w3m-reborn (w3mr) is a terminal user interface (TUI) browser for the 21st century, modelled after Akinori Ito's w3m browser. It expands upon the features w3m offers by allowing users to write scripts to enhance their browsing experience. Key features added by w3m reborn include:
- support for in-browser search engines
- in-browser url redirection using shell utilities (i.e. sed or awk)
Currently developed for Linux only. Support for other *nix OSes will be offered in the future.
Using default settings, the application can be compiled and installed using the following shell commands:
./configure.sh
make
make install
Once the program has been compiled, there are a few environment variables you will need to set in order to run it. The most important is W3M_USER_AGENT, which is used by the default http/https request handling script. By default, you may use the following value for W3M_USER_AGENT:
export W3M_USER_AGENT="Lynx/2.8.9rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1d"
If you want a default home page, set the url as the value of WWW_HOME. This is necessary for running w3m-reborn without a url argument. For example, if you want to set your homepage to duckduckgo.com, run:
export WWW_HOME="https://duckduckgo.com/"
If you want to view file types besides plain text and html using external programs, make sure your MAILCAPS is set. An example MAILCAPS path is as follows:
export MAILCAPS="${HOME}/.mailcap:/usr/etc/mailcap:/etc/mailcap"
For information on how to use mailcaps, see man mailcap.5.
To run the program:
w3mr [URL]
Remember that a url argument is required if WWW_HOME is not set.
Currently relevant environment variables are:
- W3M_USER_AGENT: The user agent to use for HTTP requests. Needed by default url-fetching script for http/https requests.
- WWW_HOME: The url of the home page. Needed when calling w3mr without url argument.
- MAILCAPS: Colon-separated list of mailcap files to use. Necessary for handling mime types beyond text/plain and text/html.