The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

finferflu · 2008-01-01 14:21:24

I have just installed this Links-hacked and so far I'm loving it. I have the best of both worlds: the lightness and speed of a text browser, plus the ability to use graphics.

Now my only problem is that I can't find my way around to configure it. For example, I can't find a keyboard shortcut to open a new tab, or a way to have numbered links.
So far I have to say it's not as good as Elinks, but it's surely the best option. I don't think I would be able to completely switch to a text-only browser, and I hope the graphics Elinks version is released as soon as possible.
I think Elinks is the best text-browser I have seen, perhaps the best web browser.

Anyway, this is the PKGBUILD I have put together from the comments on AUR:

pkgname=links-hacked
pkgver=030709
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="An enhanced version of links with support for tabs"
pkgurl="http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/"
arch=('i686')
# Web-site down indefinitely
url="http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/"
# Source URLs point to the PKGBUILD-maker's webspace.  No longer available from the maintainer's site.
source=(http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/downloads/$pkgname-$pkgver.tgz http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/downloads/links-fonts-new.tgz)
depends=('openssl' 'x-server' 'gpm' 'bzip2' 'libtiff')
md5sums=(74fb710ecfa89aceb51211f7dce24ab0 1176ee9132c9df8c1ec955e28bff6f5b)
conflicts=(links)

build() {
  cd $startdir/src/$pkgname-$pkgver/
  mv ../font ./
  ./autogen.sh
  ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-ssl --enable-javascript --enable-graphics
  sed -i "s|load_failure:|load_failure:; {}|g" options.c
  sed -i "s|already_drawn:|already_drawn:; {}|g" options_manager.c  
  sed -i "s|tabs_end:|tabs_end:; {}|g" view_gr.c
  sed -ri "s|^.*prune_font_cache.*$||" links.h
  make || return 1
  make prefix=$startdir/pkg/usr install
}

So, if you have any suggestion or personal configuration to suggest, please do.

So far what I have succesfully configured are the fonts. You can add more fonts by simply specifying your font path in the font manager, then in the User Interface menu, you can write manually the name of the font you want. A bit unpractical, but it works.

Last edited by finferflu (2008-01-01 21:23:02)

dolby · 2008-01-01 14:52:28

this project has been dead for years, no?
id just use elinks

finferflu · 2008-01-01 14:56:33

Yeah, I agree Elinks is much better, both for features and for page rendering. But I find it hard to rely on a text browser only, at times you really need the images, and I hate switching between browsers.
Do you know if elinks is being still actively developed?

Thanks.

Last edited by finferflu (2008-01-01 14:58:42)

quarks · 2008-01-01 15:09:22

dolby wrote:

this project has been dead for years, no?
id just use elinks

What we need is Elinks with graphics, but since it doesn't exist we can emulate it using links.

Thanks fingerflu, this is great.

patroclo7 · 2008-01-01 15:19:49

links-hacked was aiming just to be a graphical-elinks. Thanks for the PKGBUILD and its sed actions, I had tried to compile it many times without success.

The last release of elinks happened in April 2007 and the last git commit is only 4 days old, so I would say that it is still developed.

patroclo7 · 2008-01-01 17:30:38

Anyway I really think that nowadays graphical links (links as compiled in the links-g package in the community repo, and called with the -g command line option) is a much better light-weight graphical browser than links-hacked (which was very very promising).

Last edited by patroclo7 (2008-01-01 17:32:17)

finferflu · 2008-01-01 17:39:34

I have tried both of them, and what I couldn't live with was the absence of tabbed browsing in links-g.
As for now I am ironically using Elinks. It's just too good. I think I'll give up graphics until they release a graphic version. I was reading their bugzilla, and someone claimed that to support graphics it would have taken one week of coding, and that was in 2005
I guess when that will happen elinks will gain a lot of new users. I'm already hooked in text-mode only. I can see images and youtube videos with external programs anyways, so I'm not giving up anything, really.

Gilneas · 2008-01-01 19:01:38

Elinks supports many scripting languages, could someone explain to me how this can be useful?

dolby · 2008-01-01 19:13:49

i compile my own elinks without lua and idn support

# Contributor: Grigorios Bouzakis <grbzks[at]gmail[dot]com>
pkgname=elinks
pkgver=0.11.3
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="An advanced feature-rich text mode web browser."
url="http://elinks.or.cz/"
arch=('i686' 'x86_64')
license=('GPL')
depends=('zlib' 'bzip2' 'openssl' 'gpm' 'expat' 'spidermonkey')
source=(http://elinks.or.cz/download/$pkgname-$pkgver.tar.bz2)
md5sums=('a0eb50e18a2ac8e77d6b0df8f94bb5a6')

build() {
  cd $startdir/src/$pkgname-$pkgver

  ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc \
        --enable-cgi --enable-256-colors \
        --enable-html-highlight \
        --without-idn --without-lua --without-x
  make || return 1
  make DESTDIR=$startdir/pkg install || return 1

  rm -f $startdir/pkg/usr/share/locale/locale.alias
}

Gilneas · 2008-01-01 19:23:48

I compiled with this configure. I don't like mouse apps in a term, because some things don't work with screen with escape character ` (backtick)

./configure --prefix=$t/elinks --disable-ipv6 --disable-mouse --disable-sysmouse --enable-html-highlight --disable-backtrace --without-gpm --without-idn --without-lua --with-x

I'm not really sure what --with-x does...

Last edited by Gilneas (2008-01-01 19:24:32)

finferflu · 2008-01-01 21:22:23

Since we're talking about Elinks, do you know of any way of avoiding to have those artifacts that appear every now and then? I know that a simple Ctrl+l removes everything, but I still find it annoying.

By the way, I have just recompiled it with --disable-ipv6, and now it's even more blazingly fast than before
I also wonder what that --without-x does, Google didn't come up with anything useful to me.

Anyway, I think I'm gonna rename this thread to "The Links-hacked and Elinks thread", I find it more appropriate.

Gilneas · 2008-01-01 21:40:05

I can only compare sizes:
--with-x:

--> size elinks
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
 853177  136248   84508 1073933  10630d elinks

In memory (sum of size rss vsize) 14628

--without-x:

--> size elinks
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
 851858  136208   84508 1072574  105dbe elinks

In memory (sum of size rss vsize) 13268 (same page of course)

A minimal difference (right?) It's probably the precursor for the graphics version.

finferflu · 2008-01-01 22:17:13

I do wonder whether there's any experimental graphics support at this point...

finferflu · 2008-01-02 02:56:35

As for the artifacts, I have found out that the only way of avoiding them is setting a charset via Setup > Character set. The only problem is that this overrides the pages' own settings resulting in weird characters at times.
Now, if I have understood this post correctly, I think most of the problems will be solved on the next release.
I am tempted to put together an elinks-git PKGBUILD

Last edited by finferflu (2008-01-02 02:57:41)

klapmuetz · 2008-01-02 15:57:20

Gilneas wrote:

Elinks supports many scripting languages, could someone explain to me how this can be useful?

I used to use the ruby interface to fix some html in the previous phpbb software.
So that it looked better / more organized and fixed the awful mess that is forum software. ;-)

So that would have been an application.

Otherwise if you guys are looking for an text editor with image capabilities, I would say: w3m.
It can show pictures while running in xterm (and similar).

I use it in combination with emacs and it works pretty well.

finferflu · 2008-01-02 16:42:40

Really? I have used w3m for a bit, and images just didn't turn up? Do I need to set up something in particular?
Thanks.

phrakture · 2008-01-02 17:02:23

finferflu wrote:

Really? I have used w3m for a bit, and images just didn't turn up? Do I need to set up something in particular?
Thanks.

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=27841
:grin:

finferflu · 2008-01-02 17:38:13

Ah! Thanks. It works now. But I don't like w3m. It's not as much customisable as Elinks. I don't like how everything is organised. It looks more as a temporary replacement to a full blown browser, rather than a serious replacement. Most of all I miss the URI Passing and URI Rewriting options. Thanks to URI Passing, for example, I'm able to watch Youtube videos by running a script I have created, so I don't need to switch browser. It's just too bad that Elinks doesn't support graphics as w3m, it would have been perfect.

Also, I don't know why, but using urxvt, everything flickers too much, even the images in w3m were all messed up. With the gnome-terminal everything was fine.

finferflu · 2008-01-02 19:08:20

Ah, I just discovered that the --disable-ipv6 option makes it impossible for Elinks to connect to Yubnub.org. And that being my default URI Rewriting was just making my life impossible. I have just found an option to enable ipv4 first, so I'm happy.

Gilneas · 2008-01-02 19:55:06

Thanks for finding that out, finferflu. I too had stumbled on some pages that didn't work and do now with ipv6.

edit: I presume you mean the elinks.conf options
set connection.try_ipv4 = 1
set connection.try_ipv6 = 0

But the second option gives an error with --disable-ipv6, making it still not work.

edit2:
The man page says:

       connection.try_ipv4 [0|1] (default: 1)
              Whether to try to connect to a host over IPv4. Note that if connection.try_ipv6 is enabled too,  it  takes  prece-
              dence.  And better do not touch this at all unless you are sure what are you doing. Note that you can also force a
              given protocol to be used on a per-connection basis by using an URL in the style of i.e. http4://elinks.or.cz/.

       connection.try_ipv6 [0|1] (default: 1)
              Whether to try to connect to a host over IPv6. Note that you can also force a given  protocol  to  be  used  on  a
              per-connection basis by using an URL in the style of i.e. http6://elinks.or.cz/.

However going to http4://yubnub.org with --disable-ipv6 doesn't work.

Last edited by Gilneas (2008-01-02 20:10:54)

finferflu · 2008-01-03 01:16:25

No, I meant the option at compile time. I had rebuilt it with --disable-ipv6, so I had to rebuild it again without it.

Anyway, I was trying to have Elinks and w3m open side by side on GNU Screen, just in case I needed some graphics, but on Screen w3m displays no images. Why?

Edit
Ah, nevermind. Restarting Screen fixed the problem.

Last edited by finferflu (2008-01-03 02:02:00)

finferflu · 2008-01-03 19:41:17

I was wondering if it was possible to use w3m's w3mimgdisplay to show images in Elinks. Somebody has managed to do that for Mutt. Too bad I have no clue about programming...

Last edited by finferflu (2008-01-03 19:45:57)

Gilneas · 2008-01-03 20:17:13

finferflu wrote:

I was wondering if it was possible to use w3m's w3mimgdisplay to show images in Elinks. Somebody has managed to do that for Mutt. Too bad I have no clue about programming...

Until elinks-g comes along, I too would really like to see this too.
Having to select every image you want to display in an external viewer is very ungainly. Why the other day I loaded an image but it took a few seconds to load (500kb) so I went to another shell in screen and it was when I typed 'man xmodmap' that feh suddenly jumped up, caught the 'x', and immediately closed, the screen saying 'man modmap'. Bad timing or what.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-01-01 14:21:24

The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#2 2008-01-01 14:52:28

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#3 2008-01-01 14:56:33

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#4 2008-01-01 15:09:22

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#5 2008-01-01 15:19:49

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#6 2008-01-01 17:30:38

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#7 2008-01-01 17:39:34

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#8 2008-01-01 19:01:38

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#9 2008-01-01 19:13:49

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#10 2008-01-01 19:23:48

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#11 2008-01-01 21:22:23

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#12 2008-01-01 21:40:05

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#13 2008-01-01 22:17:13

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#14 2008-01-02 02:56:35

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#15 2008-01-02 15:57:20

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#16 2008-01-02 16:42:40

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#17 2008-01-02 17:02:23

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#18 2008-01-02 17:38:13

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#19 2008-01-02 19:08:20

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#20 2008-01-02 19:55:06

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#21 2008-01-03 01:16:25

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#22 2008-01-03 19:41:17

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

#23 2008-01-03 20:17:13

Re: The Links-hacked and Elinks thread

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