Text-mode Browser and E-mail

FF2 vs. FF3, touchpad buttons, processor speed, memory and HD limitations, blah, blah blah....



Hey, wanna be a real GEEK?! Wanna put some really light apps on your One and make use of that delightful keyboard? Wanna amaze and mystify your friends???

The September issue of Linux Journal (linuxjournal.com) had some great articles about text-mode browsers and a text-mode E-mail client. I think they are available for reading on line (I can get to them, but I am a subscriber -- however, many current articles are usually open to everyone). Marcel Gagné wrote about several browsers, most of which are available via Add/Remove programs on the One. I tried several and had various problems, but once I hit on elinks I was up and running. It's a very nice program with some interesting capabilities, including allowing you to view images by opening them in gthumb. It even supports tabbed browsing! (I thought it wasn't working until I realized that the tabs are at the bottom of the window, not the top!) Elinks is actually fairly intuitive, especially if you have ever used lynx. Here's a hint -- pressing <esc> opens up the menu.

Victor Gregorio wrote a great article about mutt, a text-mode E-mail client. Mutt is not as intuitive as elinks, as you need to create and edit a configuration file to get started, and in the default configuration you need to know vim commands to write E-mail (<esc>:wq, anyone?). It actually took me all afternoon to get things sorted out with mutt, and there were a couple of fine points that I didn't grasp until I got into bed that night. At one point a blasted everything in my Gmail inbox into my Gmail archives as a result of mutt being an imap client. If you want to start experimenting, I would definitely recommend trying elinks first.

(I also ran into some crazy behavior with the One's file system. In Thunar, /mnt/home and /home/user look to be one and the same, but apparently that is not exactly so. I used gedit to create the mutt configuration file in /mnt/home, then executed mutt from /home/user, and mutt couldn't find it. Then mutt put it's mailbox file in /mnt/home, even though I started it from /home/user. Gotta look into this some more!)

Have fun!

(Hey, I remember when attaching a mouse to a laptop was considered the height of absurdity!)

 

I still use pine every day for my private mail. Although it is named alpine nowadays. Never got used to mutt.

 

Oh my gosh, I haven't heard of pine for ten years or more. Never did use it, but remember someone mentioning it years ago. Thanks for the reference, I will check it out. Mutt is definitely a handful!

 

Just a quick update: been using mutt as an imap client for almost a week now and finding it quite enjoyable. Someone suggested installing nano and using that as the default editor, which really simplifies writing messages (no more <esc><shift>:wq to save and close). Access to other "mailboxes" in Gmail (such as sent or drafts or any label that you have set) is simple using the <esc> c key sequence.

Putting the terminal window in "full screen" mode helps also.

 

I prefer Lynx Just to test if webpages are in fact readable cross platform.
Which unfortunately also required me to install IE on my One, but hey.

 

Hello,

Hey, I've installed Elinks 0.11.3 on my AA1 with Pirut, the package manager...

But now I don't know how to start it :? (yes, Linux newbie inside !)

I can see an Elinks executable in /usr/bin... But nothing happens if I click or double-click on it...

Any help is welcome

 

Four or five posts and no one has mentione Emacs? It does so many things, you don't even need to other with a window manager, just boot right into a terminal...

Perry
www.kidpub.com

 

Just open a terminal window then enter elinks (all lower case). Or do <alt><F2>, enter elinks, and check "run in terminal".

Hope you have fun experimenting. There is a bit of a learning curve, but worth it.

 

Ah thank you for your answer Ace_Rimmer !

In a Terminal it works correctly now.

Ok, let's see how fun it is to text-surf the 'modern' web

 

One "fun" feature of Linux is that many processes fail silently (i.e., no error message), leaving you to wonder "what happened?".

Have fun!