W3M - Better than the rest

I have been using w3m as a distraction-free way to surf the net when I should be working.

I chose it as my secondary browser a year or so ago. My use case is reading news articles in the terminal. Ideally no JS or full-fledged browser stuff, so I don't need the fully-functioning text-based browsers out there.

W/ W3M though, I started to grow frustrated w/ the keyboard shortcuts and decided to try the alternatives.

The Competition

I did not try everything, just 2-3 from the debian repo.

links

• Outdated
• Basically in maintenance mode

elinks

• Updated (relative to links)
• Intuitive shortcut keys out of the box
• Terrible inheritance of terminal colors
  • I have a script that choose 4-5 different konsole profiles and it makes a royal mess of it. Color scheme changing is a mess which makes it impossible for me
• No obvious way of using plugins like rdrview

What brought me back to W3M

• Changed the shortcuts to be more intuitive
• keymap R EXEC_SHELL 'rdrview -H "$W3M_URL" | w3m -dump -T text/html -cols $(tput cols) | less' to quickly toggle rdrview and strip out the html cluttering a page
• I've grown used to the way it navigates between links w/ [+<insert number>

Bookmarked Sites

• Techmeme - Tech News (mobile site for less clutter)
• clime.cloud - Minimalist version of Google News (also open-source)
• NPR (text site) - Lite list of top National News
• timef - More minimalist News
• otechy - Summarized World News

What might take me away from W3M

It's still early, but I have been playing around w/ newsraft. Still getting used to using an RSS Feed in the terminal. Feels a tad too cluttered ATM but it does feel productive curating my own sources. Another aspect I'm unsure about is feeling like I'm drinking through a firehose though. I will give it a while and then post an updated w/ my experience.