Browsing the internet from the command line

Question

How can I browse the Internet from the command line in Ubuntu?

score 149 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 01 '16 at 13:18

There are actually a bunch of text-mode web-browsers, these are my top three :)

ELinks (install):
- Keyboard Shortcuts
  - Open new tab - t
  - Goto URL - g
  - Go back - Left
  - Go forward - u
  - Exit - q
  - Toggle images - *
  - Toggle link numbering - .
  - Toggle document colours - %
  - Next tab - >
  - Previous tab - <
  - Close tab - c
  - Open in new tab in background - T
- Automatic URL rewrites
  - d - dictionary search
  - dmoz - dmoz search
  - g - google search
  - wiki - wikipedia search
(source)

Lynx (install):
- Lynx User-Guide

w3m (install):
- w3m Manual

Wikipedia has a List of more text-based web-browsers, not all of which are available in Ubuntu.

score 82 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 01 '17 at 15:46

To my surprise it exists; I installed it and it works!

 sudo apt-get install w3m w3m-img

to open a webpage simply type in a terminal window: w3m <url_of_the_webpage>
to open a new page: type Shift-U
to go back one page: Shift-B
open a new tab: Shift-T

W3M can handle Gmail(!)

If you use for example XTerm (not Gnome Terminal), W3M is even capable of showing images!

For more information see “How to Browse From the Linux Terminal With W3M”.

score 23 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 08 '11 at 18:43

links2 -g is a strange terminal-embedded graphical-mode browser. It's fast but hates modernity.

If you like to search from the command line, try surfraw .

   Surfraw  provides  a fast unix command line interface to a variety of
   popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power.  It reclaims
   google,  altavista, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and
   many others from the false‐prophet,  pox‐infested  heathen  lands  of
   html‐forms,  placing  these  wonders  where they belong, deep in unix
   heartland, as god loving extensions to the shell.

Trivia note : Surfraw was originally written by Julian Assange. (Acronym/backronym for 'SURFRAW' is Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Rage Against the World Wide Web.)

Here's some example usage. To search Google for "nm-applet memory leak" :
sr google nm-applet memory leak

To search for an RFC dealing with S/MIME:
sr rfc s/mime

Translate a word:
sr translate logiciel

Find torrents:
sr piratebay natty narwhal

More advanced, from surfraw.alioth.debian.org :

     $ surfraw google -results=100 RMS, GNU, which is sinner, which is sin?
     $ sr wikipedia surfraw
     $ sr austlii -method=phrase dog like
     $ /usr/lib/surfraw/rhyme -method=perfect Julian

You can set it up with some defaults in .config/surfraw/conf :

SURFRAW_graphical_browser="/usr/bin/links2 -g"
SURFRAW_text_browser="/usr/bin/elinks"
SURFRAW_graphical=yes

score 15 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 08 '11 at 16:56

15

If you meant a CLI based Internet browser, use w3m:

w3m 'http://example.com/'

answered Mar 08 '11 at 16:56

Lekensteyn

178,446

score 15 · Answer 5 · edited Nov 12 '15 at 15:24

My personal favorite of the text-based browsers is links2. You can install it with

sudo apt-get install links2

And then load a webpage with

links2 www.google.com

Other alternatives that have not been mentioned are:

elinks : "an advanced and well-established feature-rich text mode web (HTTP/FTP/..) browser. ELinks can render both frames and tables, is highly customizable and can be extended via Lua or Guile scripts. It is quite portable and runs on a variety of platforms"
retawk : "an interactive, multi-threaded network client (web browser) for text terminals on computers with Unix-like operating systems. It is written in C, fast, small, nicely configurable, and comfortable; e.g. the low-level network communications are performed in a non-blocking way, and you can keep open as many "virtual windows" as you want and work simultaneously in two of them in a split-screen mode"
netrtik

score 11 · Answer 6 · edited Jul 05 '18 at 21:45

Another very good command line browser is lynx.

The most basic usage would be:

lynx http://askubuntu.com

It will most likely ask if you want to allow cookies.

To navigate the page use the arrow keys. Here is a short description of the most important ones.

Left - move back in history
Right - follow a link
Up - move to previous focusable item
Down - move to next focusable item
Enter - enter link / trigger action
Backspace - history page
Space - move page down by a page
b - move page up by a page
Shift + q - Quit

That is the most basic key navigation commands.

score 10 · Answer 7 · edited Nov 11 '19 at 17:59

Browsh might be a solution. From the site:

Browsh is a fully-modern text-based browser. It renders anything that a modern browser can; HTML5, CSS3, JS, video and even WebGL. Its main purpose is to be run on a remote server and accessed via SSH/Mosh or the in-browser HTML service in order to significantly reduce bandwidth and thus both increase browsing speeds and decrease bandwidth costs.

It uses headless Firefox in the background to run the interactive stuff. It's frequently updated.

score 8 · Answer 8 · answered Mar 08 '11 at 20:43

You want a text browser or a command line method? This is command line, using telnet e.g.

telnet askubuntu.com 80

GET /

It doesn't support SSL, graphics, HTML5 etc and you might have to guess the index page if the server doesn't have a default file. But it is better than nothing and a very quick testing tool.

score 6 · Answer 9 · answered May 03 '14 at 13:19

Yes, you can use lynx.

From man lynx:

Lynx is a fully-featured World Wide Web (WWW) client for users running cursor-addressable, character-cell display devices (e.g., vt100 terminals, vt100 emulators running on Windows 95/NT or Macintoshes, or any other "curses-oriented" display). It will display hypertext markup language (HTML) documents containing links to files residing on the local system, as well as files residing on remote systems running Gopher, HTTP, FTP, WAIS, and NNTP servers. Current versions of Lynx run on Unix, VMS, Windows 95/NT, 386DOS and OS/2 EMX.

You can install it by executing the following command:

sudo apt-get install lynx-cur

score 4 · Answer 10 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:25

4

You can use W3M for this purpose.
Also there is lynx.

They can handle basic features, and are ok if you want to set up your router via your home workstation by ssh, for example.
I would prefer using a local instance of a browser forwarding connection with ssh

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:25

Community

1

answered May 03 '14 at 13:24

davidbaumann

1,915

score 3 · Answer 11 · answered May 18 '18 at 12:41

If you'd like to avoid extra installations, you can hand-craft http requests. This is an http minimal request:

printf "GET /\r\nHost: askubuntu.com\r\n\r\n" | netcat askubuntu.com 80

This is an https request:

printf "GET /\r\nHost: askubuntu.com\r\n\r\n" | socat - OPENSSL:askubuntu.com 443

score 3 · Answer 12 · edited Mar 29 '15 at 22:51

3

Another program that might work for you is lynx. It is a terminal based web browser.

edited Mar 29 '15 at 22:51

Kalle Richter

6,519

answered Mar 08 '11 at 17:15

Reuben Swartz

1,187

score 2 · Answer 13 · answered May 03 '14 at 13:22

2

You can use the browser lynx. It is available in the Ubuntu repositories:

sudo apt-get install lynx

Here is further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

answered May 03 '14 at 13:22

chili555

61,330

score 0 · Answer 14 · answered Sep 03 '23 at 21:24

0

A chromium based browser has been released called carbonyl

https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl

Docker

 docker run --rm -ti fathyb/carbonyl https://youtube.com

npm

npm install --global carbonyl
carbonyl https://github.com

answered Sep 03 '23 at 21:24

KhalfaniW

121

Browsing the internet from the command line

14 Answers14

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