W3m

Free and open-source text-based web browser
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w3m
w3m running in an xterm displaying the Wikipedia main page.
Developer(s)Akinori Ito and team members
Initial release1995
Stable release
0.5.3[1] Edit this on Wikidata / 15 January 2011
Preview release
v0.5.3+git20230121[2] Edit this on Wikidata / 21 January 2023
Repository
  • github.com/tats/w3m Edit this at Wikidata
Written inC
Operating systemOS/2,[3][4] Unix & Unix-like (Solaris, SunOS, HP-UX, Linux, FreeBSD and EWS-UX (EWS-4800),[5] Windows (with Cygwin), macOS (with Homebrew)
Available inEnglish and Japanese
TypeWeb browser, Terminal pager
LicenseMIT license
Websitew3m.sourceforge.net Edit this on Wikidata

w3m is a free software/open source text-based web browser and terminal pager. It has support for tables, frames,[4] SSL connections, color, and inline images on suitable terminals.[6] Generally, it renders pages in a form as true to their original layout as possible.

The name "w3m" stands for "WWW wo miru (WWWを見る)", which is Japanese for "to see the WWW" where W3 is a numeronym of WWW.[7]

As of 2021[update], the original project appears to be inactive, while a currently maintained version exists and is packaged in various Linux distributions such as Debian and Fedora. This version is available from the repository of Debian developer Tatsuya Kinoshita.

The most notable feature is full keyboard navigability on everything.[6][better source needed][dubious – discuss] For instance, searching using Google can be done through the terminal.[6] Links can be navigated using the arrow keys. Even gmail is navigable in the same manner.[6]

In Emacs

w3m is also used by the Emacs text editor via the emacs-w3m.el Emacs Lisp module.

Forks

Two forks of w3m add support for multiple character-encodings and for other features not in the original:

  1. Hironori Sakamoto's w3m-m17n ("m17n" stands for multilingualization)
  2. Kiyokazu Suto's w3mmee ("mee" stands for "Multi-Encoding Extension")

See also

References

  1. ^ "w3m Files".
  2. ^ "v0.5.3+git20230121".
  3. ^ TOKORO, Kyosuke. "w3m 0.2.1–3 for OS/2 WARP". Retrieved 16 August 2010.
  4. ^ a b Watson, Dave (September 2001). "Text-Mode Web Browsers for OS/2". The Southern California OS/2 User Group. Retrieved 16 August 2010.
  5. ^ w3m manual page
  6. ^ a b c d Hoffman, Chris (23 January 2012). "How to Browse From the Linux Terminal With W3M". How-To Geek. Retrieved 31 July 2021.
  7. ^ "W3M FAQ". Retrieved 8 April 2022.

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