Episode: 1848
Title: HPR1848: Introduction to w3m, a Command Line Web Browser
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1848/hpr1848.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:06:03

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This is HBR Episode 1848 entitled Introduction to W3M, a command-in web browser.
It is hosted by Frank Bell and in about 15 minutes long.
The summary is a brief introduction to using W3M, a command-in web browser with tab and image support.
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Hello, this is Frank Bell.
Today I want to talk a little bit about W3M.
W3M is a text web browser that you can run from the command line or NA terminal.
Unlike the other command line web browsers I view such as links, LRI-NX, links, LINKS,
and E-links, E-LINKS, W3M has support for tabs and image healing.
How I got to using W3M is quite by accident.
My primary distro is Slackware Current.
I've tried many other distros.
I have three on different computers in the house today,
but I always find myself coming back to the elegant simplicity of Slackware.
Current is the testing version,
kind of equivalent to deviant testing.
And when you run a testing version of any distro, you have to expect that sometimes stuff breaks.
Now, stuff breaks very, very rarely on Slackware, but something broke this weekend.
Slackware pushed out an update to Current, and there was a file in the update that shouldn't have been there,
and that file broke X on most Slackware machines.
Certainly I know on 64-bit machines because mine is a 64-bit machine.
So, I'm left there with this big brawny computer and no GUI.
I have other computers, so I figured I'd just wade it out until Slackware pushed out
on update to fix the problem, which happened in less than 48 hours.
But in the meantime, I found myself playing around with command line browsers,
and I stumbled over W3M, which I had heard about back when I was working with learning how to use
my one of the persons whose post I found useful had set up W3M for viewing HTML emails.
But I hadn't really used it other than in that context, and I do write my tab browsers.
So, I decided to give W3M more of a try when I learned that it had tabs.
I wouldn't know the image support for viewing image is not available in some terminal emulators.
Console and Terminator, both of which I tested W3M with, will not display the images.
However, X-Term will. So, I found myself also learning a little bit about X-Term.
I did find that the black background and light colored text that many distros ship
as the default X-Term configuration is not at all friendly to viewing the web.
The web browser, W3M, is easier to use and much more attractive if you have a white background
and dark text. So, I also found out a way to change that using the X-Term menus.
Who knew that X-Term had menus? But the way you get to them is by holding down the control key
and clicking your mouse button. And I found that if you select the reverse video option on whichever
menu you had that, that would switch the display from white on black to black on white.
I'm including in the show notes a link to the article where I found out about the X-Term menus.
You launch W3M by typing W3M space and a URL. If you don't type a URL, you will get a help file.
If you misspell the URL, W3M will still open and it will give you an invalid URL message.
You can then enter the URL by hitting Shift U, Capital U, that opens a dialog window
and the bottom of the W3M window and you can type in the correct URL.
Once you have the URL open, you can navigate the page and fairly typical fashion you can use the
arrow keys. You can use the HJK arrow keys as if you were in them. If those appeal to you,
you can use page up and page down. You can use the tab key to jump from one link to another
on a page or Shift tab to jump backward to the link. If you get to the bottom of a wrong page and
you want to move up, you can use the arrows, you can hit the home key, the page up, or you can
also use the B key, lowercase B for back. That will take you back up the page in the increments
in which you move down the page. So now you've got your red page open, you've looked around it,
you decide you want to go to the previous page. Say you were at HaggarPublicRadio.org and then you
went to guardian.co.uk. You want to go back to HaggarPublicRadio. You would press the capital B key,
B stands for buffer. It's kind of reminiscent of EMAX terminology. The capital B will take you
back to the previous page and you can cycle all the way back through any pages you had opened
in that tab. So now you're at home navigating around on a web page, you want to open a new tab.
You open a new tab by hitting capital T or hold down this Shift key and press the T. That will
open a new tab that replicates the tab that you were looking at. So if you were looking at
HaggarPublicRadio.org, you will now have two HaggarPublicRadio.org tabs. You can use the capital U
to open a new URL in one of them. If you want to go to the other tab, if you want to navigate
between tabs or month tabs, you use the curly brackets. Think of the curly brackets as stylized
arrows. To navigate tabs to the right, you would press the right curly bracket key. To navigate
tabs to the left, you would press the left curly bracket key and then browse the page as you would
any other page. Now you find a neat site you want to bookmark it. To bookmark a site, you press
escape a, escape and lowercase a and that will open up a dialog for creating a bookmark.
The bookmark file allows for section or categories. So you could have say a Linux category,
a news category, an iCandy category, whatever categories you want. If you have no category,
created the bookmark dialog will prompt you to create one for this particular site.
If you already have categories created and you're adding a new bookmark,
it will prompt you to use an existing category or to type in a new category.
Say you have a Linux category, you can create a news category. Then you cursor down to the word
add, the add button and hit enter and your bookmark is saved. To open your bookmark list,
you press escape b, lowercase b and you will be presented with a list of bookmarks. If you decide
you want to stay on the page you are on, you don't want to go to a different place or you're just
checking to make sure your bookmark got entered properly. You use the uppercase b for buffer
to go back to the page you were looking at. You can also run a shell command. So you're busily,
yeah, you're in, you're in next term. You don't have tabs in next term. But if you need to go look
at a directory, you can press the pound key, also known as the number sign, also known as the
hash, also known as the octo-thorpe, commonly located above the three on a usc board. That will
open a dialogue in the bottom of the window where you can enter a command. If you enter say
ls and press enter, you will be presented with a directory listing of your current directory.
And you can then navigate to wherever you want to do in the shell. And then when you're done,
press the capital B buffer key to go back to the previous buffer, the web page you were looking at.
A couple of other pointers. If you want to log in to say a four, say you,
ping around it, Linux questions the way I do. You would navigate to the username field,
position the cursor in the username field, and press enter. A dialogue containing the word text
and a column will appear in the bottom line of W3M, enter your username, type in your user name,
and press enter, and it will appear in the dialogue on the web page. Then cursor down to the
password blank, hit enter, and again a dialogue will appear preceded by the word text.
You can type in your password directly, or if you do as I do and use key pass x,
you've got these honking great long passwords and it's a real chore to type them in.
You can copy them from your password vault and paste them in. You can't right click and get
a paste dialogue that's not supported. You can't do control V, not support it, but what you can do
is position the insertion point as we used to call it back in the olden days at the beginning of
that text field and press the middle mouse button and it will paste the password and hit enter,
then navigate to the login button and log in. I actually spent quite a bit of time yesterday
navigating around, please pardon me, the phone is ringing, if somebody called unavailable,
if they're unavailable, I'm unavailable too. Okay, now the answering machine is busy ignoring them.
Well, oh yeah, I spent a time cruising around with this question just today and navigation in
W3M is very fast and I was actually able to enter a post to answer, so try to answer somebody
question, I actually take a stab at it. Now what happens when you want to say enter a forum post?
Are you typing a comment to a blog or having for building newspaper website the cesspool
location for all comments? If you move to the button that's or the item that says post and the
way the buttons appear commonly will be bracket in the text and then close bracket in red.
And you click that and W3M will put you into the default text editor or your distro.
If it's slackware that will be by on mint or that will be vim and you type in your comment and
prove it and just the way you wrote if you were just typing directly into the text editor,
then you save the comment and W3M will put you back on the web page and your comment will appear
in the draft box for you to click to submit it or whatever the button happens saying that particular
location. A couple of other little pointers, if you're looking at a website that's wider than
the screen, say you've done a Google image search for Lagonda motorcars and the web page is wider
than your screen. You can scroll to the left or right using the comma to scroll left and the
period to scroll right. So that's my little bit about W3M. This is not by any means intended to be
exhaustive. It's intended to cover some basics so you can give it a try and not feel as lost as
I did for the first half hour or hour. In the show notes I have included links to a couple of
websites and a YouTube video that helped me get comfortable with W3M. I linked to the website
where I learned about the X term menus because I figured that's a neat bit of information. A lot
of people would find useful and the location of the W3M manual which you can either find it online
or when you install W3M it should be installed in your doc directory which is probably usr
share doc or might be just usr doc. I will urge you to print the manual out if you really want
to pursue this. It's only about 12 pages long and contains lots of mostly lists of key bindings
but they're categorized as to whether they have to do with browsing or text entry or what have you.
I found the easiest way to print it out is to open it into your browser as it is an HTML file
and print it from there and it will come out very nice and readable. Oh and one other thing I
wanted to mention. The bookmarks file bookmarks.html will be stored in your doc W3M
directory and your home folder. It is a simple HTML file you can edit it with any text editor
so if you end up say as I did with the duplicate bookmark and you want to get rid of it or you want
to correct an error. Very easy to fix. I will urge you to give W3M a try. It's almost certainly
in your distro's repo. If you're a slackware user there is a slack build. It's slackbuilds.org.
If you have any questions you can contact me at frank at pineviewfarm.net. My website is www.pineviewfarm.net.
Thank you very much.
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