Enhancements for the links browser

links is a text-based and simple graphical browser I use frequently. It shares the advantages of text-based browsers like lynx and w3m in presenting content but ignoring appearance. Its lack of JavaScript support makes it safe and causes it to display all content from a web page when some of it is hidden by JavaScript. I have seen web pages which display no text in ordinary browsers but where links displays several pages of text. Unlike other text-based browsers, links has a graphical mode in which it displays images.

links is not under heavy development any more, and I found that I would have liked some small improvements. So I added and fixed some small things, some of which the developers have already adopted in the upstream version. Current enhancements relative to 2.28 are:

• Display of OpenStreetmap tile map on icbm:// URLs
• Support for supplementary TTF fonts
• Display and entry/editing of POST parameters with URL
• Key shortcut to corresponding internet archive URL
• Some emacs keys in line edits, such as Alt-B, Alt-F, Alt-D, Alt-Backspace, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, Ctrl-T, Alt->
• History search in input lines
• Features to bypass unneeded JavaScript (hidden text to be revealed with JS, links without link text that work with JS)
• Middle mouse button click goes to URL in X selection
• Respect newlines in selection of preformatted regions to allow copying source code
• Site-specific cookie policy option

My patches are distributed as a git repository available via my web server. They are currently based on release 2.28 of links and are going to be rebased occasionally to later releases. To obtain only the patches for the newest links version, run:

git clone --single-branch https://volkerschatz.com/repositories/links

To retrieve the patches for an older version such as 2.19 only, use the following command (not all previous versions are available):

git clone -b patches-2.19 --single-branch https://volkerschatz.com/repositories/links

If you leave out the --single-branch, the branches containing patches for older links versions will also be retrieved, but no local branches will be created for them. There is no git command for cloning all branches as local branches in a repository with a working tree, but the following sequence of commands does that:

mkdir links
cd links
git clone --mirror https://volkerschatz.com/repositories/links .git
git config core.bare false                    
git reset --hard

If you need no working tree or can live with cloning single-branch working repositories later, a simple git clone --mirror is sufficient.

TOS / Impressum