Browse internet inside terminal

There are three families of text web browsers.

lynx is the classic text mode web browser. It's slightly older than the web. Its interface is nothing to write home about. It has the advantage of being available on many exotic platforms.

links is a more recent implementation of the same concept. There's an alternate development tree, elinks, for which there is an experimental patch for Javascript support, but this is not enabled in the Ubuntu package.

w3m has an interface with a different (and I think much more nicer) feel. It's better than the others (though links has been improving lately) at rendering web sites with complex formatting, not necessarily the way the designer intended it, but in a readable way. It can display images. There's an Emacs interface, w3m-el.

My recommendation is to use w3m now but keep an eye on (e)links's evolutions.

lynx is my favorite. It is available in the Software Center.

Elinks is IMHO best to use on a daily basis.

Amongst other features it supports

• tabs
• bookmarks
• javascript
• tables
• transparency
• and you can easily "pipe" a page to any other program like Firefox with vimperator, or scripts if you'd like.

Gmail is still very much workable and as any other page, very fast under Elinks.