ELinks – Full-Featured Text WWW Browser

ELinks is an Open Source project covered by the GNU General Public License.

If you want to see ELinks in action check out the screenshots.

ELinks is a program for browsing the web in text mode. The goal of the project has from the beginning been to provide a feature-rich text mode browser with an open patches/features inclusion policy and active development. One of these features is that ELinks includes Links-Lua which adds scripting capabilities to ELinks.

It may seem strange that anyone would develop a text mode browser in a world where the power of computers keep improving and most people favor graphical applications. Most graphical browsers are slow (especially to start up) and eat a lot of memory. For some people, this is unacceptable, so avoiding these browsers to harvest your critical system resources when doing basic tasks on the net is one thing. Text browsers are also invaluable on servers without a graphical environment and over SSH (or similiar) text-only sessions. Besides, text mode browsing is fun and highly addictive when you get the hang of it. 😉

ELinks was forked from the original Links browser written by Mikulas Patocka. It is in no way associated with Twibright Labs and their Links version.

Below the most noteworthy features are listed.

* Lots of protocols (local files, finger, http, https, ftp, smb, ipv4, ipv6)

* Authentication (HTTP authentication, Proxy authentication)

* Persistent cookies

* Cute menus and dialogs (screenshot available)

* Tabbed browsing

* Support for browser scripting (Perl, Lua, Guile)

* Tables and frames rendering (screenshot available)

* Colors (screenshot available)

* Background (non-blocking) downloads (screenshot available)

ELinks is written in near-ANSI C and is quite portable. It has been reported to run at least on the following platforms:

For more see the official site