Table of Contents

Terminal Web Browsing and BitTorrent with ELinks

ELinks is a terminal text-based web browser. The full official manual can be found at http://elinks.or.cz/documentation/index.html. Some other text-based browsers include Lynx and Links.

Installation

In Debian and many distributions you can simply install it with your package manager: 

sudo apt install elinks

You can also build it from source by downloading it from http://elinks.or.cz/ and build it using your typical C build process of configure and make. 

wget http://elinks.or.cz/download/elinks-current-0.13.tar.gz
tar xzf elinks-current-0.13.tar.gz
cd elinks-0.13-20210402  # Or whatever it's named
./configure --help | less
 
# You might also need to install some dev libraries like:
sudo apt install libz-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev
 
./configure --enable-gopher --enable-smb --enable-256-colors \
 --enable-html-highlight --with-python --with-x --enable-bittorrent
 
make
src/elinks
sudo make install  # Optional

Basic usage

To launch elinks, simply invoke elinks from the command-line. 

elinks
 
# Open multiple tabs at once
elinks devdungeon.com electropunk.net

The main menu at the top is your best friend when starting out. Use the ALT key (or mouse if it is supported) to open the menu in the top. From here you can explore some of the capabilities.

To see what features ELinks was built with, go to the Help | About menu with ALT-h a. Your version may or may not have support for BitTorrent and Gopher protocols, mouse support, SSL/TLS, and other things.