w3m is simply amazing

You know, I always thought of myself as being a person who has seen many strange sights that most have nary a chance to see. Things like the innards of a computer, autopsy pictures (autopsy pictures? eww...) and other stuff. But what amazes me completely is the power of a text-based web browser.

You've got that right, a text-based web browser.

Nowadays, people are complaining about all sorts of lousy pop-up ads, miserable windows that just open almost non-stop, horrible javascripts that disallow right clicking on the screen... the list goes on. But with the use of a text-based web browser, all these worries are completely gone!

There are two main text-based web-browsers that I use: w3m and lynx. lynx is the de facto web browser that has been around even longer than I have, and as a web browser, it does a pretty good job at displaying web pages. Unfortunately, it fails in rendering tables; a key feature of layouts on the web page.

Then came w3m.

My, was I impressed with w3m! It can render tables, and has a more intuitive cursor based page navigation as opposed to lynx's page-by-page navigation. In fact, here's a look of this blog as shown in w3m:


Amazing right?

So, if all you want to do is to read words nicely and forget about all those nonsense that loads on your computer while you are reading the words, go for a text-based web browser like w3m or lynx.