w3m

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w3m
is a text-based web browser as well as a pager like
more
or
less
. With w3m you can browse web pages through a
Terminal emulator
window. Moreover, w3m can be used as a text formatting tool which typesets HTML into plain text.
Installation
Install
the
w3m
package.
Usage
See
w3m(1)
.
Configuration
w3m can either be configured using the in-browser settings menu or by directly modifying its configuration files.
Some of the more advanced options are not available using the settings menu, so it is recommended editing the configuration files themselves.
By default all configuration files reside in
~/.w3m
.
/etc/w3m/config
isn't exposed so
o
(= Option Setting Panel),
tab
until in an unselected setting (eg a
( )YES
),
Enter
to select that,
tab
down to an
[OK]
and
Enter
on that to leave the panel. You will now have
~/.w3m/config
.
Tips and tricks
Vim keybinds
Replace
~/.w3m/keymap
with a
custom configuration
.
URL hints
w3m supports
qutebrowser
-like link navigation, simply navigate to your config file and change the following line from
display_link_number 0
to
display_link_number 1
.
And add
keymap f COMMAND "RESHAPE ; LINK_BEGIN ; GOTO_LINK"
and
keymap F COMMAND "RESHAPE ; LINK_BEGIN ; TAB_LINK"
to
~/.w3m/keymap
.
Note
While qutebrowser supports a variety of keys to select hints, in w3m you can only select links using the number keys.
Using kittens image protocol
Users of the
kitty
terminal emulator may chose to use its own
graphics protocol
.
To do so simply change the following lines in
~/.w3m/config
:
inline_img_protocol 0
imgdisplay w3mimgdisplay
to:
inline_img_protocol 4
imgdisplay kitty
Using Iterm2 image protocol
Users of the
wezterm
terminal emulator may chose to use the
Iterm2 graphics protocol
which WezTerm supports.
To do so simply change the following lines in
~/.w3m/config
:
inline_img_protocol 0
imgdisplay w3mimgdisplay
to:
inline_img_protocol 3
imgdisplay iterm2
Searching
You can set
wrap_search
to 1, to allow searches to jump to the top after they have hit the bottom of all matches within a page.
You can set
ignorecase_search
to 1 to enable case insensitive searching.
Note
Unlike other browsers and text editors, w3m has no option for smartcase searching.
Custom search engines
You can map keys to launch a CGI script that will capture your input and pass it onto a custom search engine, to do so first create a keybind inside
~/.w3m/keymap
to launch your script:
keymap s COMMAND "SET_OPTION dictcommand=file:///cgi-bin/omnibar_google.cgi ; DICT_WORD"
And place
omnibar_google.cgi
inside your
~/.w3m/cgi-bin
directory and giving it execute permission.
While the above script will return a Google result, you can use these kinds of scripts to search StackOverflow, GitHub, DuckDuckGo, Reddit and a bunch of other websites.
You can view similar scripts on
GitHub
.
Reader mode
Some webpages do not work well with w3m, be it because they use a lot of javascript or CSS to display most of their content. Very often you will have to scroll multiple pages just to get to the start of an article.
This can be mitigated by first passing the webpages through a reader mode program such as
rdrview-git
AUR
.
To do so add the following to
~/.w3m/keymap
:
keymap R COMMAND "READ_SHELL 'rdrview $W3M_URL -H 2> /dev/null 1> /tmp/readable.html' ; LOAD /tmp/readable.html"
Redirect URLs
~/.w3m/siteconf
file is used to set some preferences depending on the website, such as: referrer and user agent.
It can also be used to redirect to lighter (both in terms of layout and bandwidth), more privacy respecting alternatives to websites.
In addition to this it can also be used to run certain CGI scripts.
~/.w3m/siteconf
url m!^https?://([a-z]+\.)?twitter\.com/!
substitute_url "https://nitter.net/"

url m!^https?://([a-z]+\.)?reddit\.com/!
substitute_url "https://safereddit.com/"

#url m!^https?://([a-z]+\.)?google\.com/!
#substitute_url "https://duckduckgo.com/lite/"

url m!^https?://([a-z]+\.)?imgur\.com/!
substitute_url "https://rimgo.pussthecat.org/"

url m!^https?://([a-z]+\.)?wikipedia\.com/!
substitute_url "https://wl.vern.cc/"

url "https://www.youtube.com/" exact
substitute_url "file:/cgi-bin/video.cgi?"
#substitute_url "https://yewtu.be/"

url "https://stackoverflow.com/" exact
substitute_url "https://ao.bloatcat.tk/"

url "https://www.reuters.com/" exact
substitute_url "https://neuters.de/"

url "https://fandom.com/" exact
substitute_url "https://breezewiki.pussthecat.org/"

url "https://medium.com/" exact
substitute_url "https://scribe.rip/"

url "https://web.archive.org/" exact
substitute_url "https://wayback-classic.net/"
Restore closed windows
Default w3m cannot reopen closed tabs, this can be added by binding the close tab button to echo the current URL of the tab to be closed to a text file, and binding another key to restore the latest URL added to the file, using a CGI script.
Inside
~/.w3m/keymap
add:
keymap d COMMAND "EXTERN 'echo %s >> ~/.w3m/RestoreTab.txt' ; CLOSE_TAB"
keymap u COMMAND TAB_GOTO file:/cgi-bin/restore_tab.cgi
Then place the following file inside
~/.w3m/cgi-bin
and make it
executable
.
restore_tab.cgi
Opening magnet links
magnet.cgi
can be used to make w3m auto open magnet links using
Transmission
.
Fingerprinting
The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.
Reason:
It is questionable how much these settings actually help reduce the user's fingerprint (Discuss in
Talk:W3m#Advice in Fingerprinting section is of questionable value
)
Using tor
You can use
torify(1)
to route w3m traffic through
tor
.
$ torify w3m -v
User agent and headers
By default w3m uses its own user agent, meaning w3m users stand out amongst other users.
Fingerprint can be reduced by using a more generic user agent, language and http_accept header.
~/.w3m/config
user_agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NO 10.0; rev:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox91.0
no_referer 1
cross_origin_referer 0
accept_language en-US,en;q=0.5
accept_encoding gzip, deflate
accept_media text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Disable cookies
To disable cookies set
use_cookie
to 0 in
~/.w3m/config
.
Disable cache
To disable cache set
no_cache
to 1 in
~/.w3m/config
.
Troubleshooting
Images flickering/causing lag
Unfortunately, sometimes w3m lags when trying to scroll past an image, to the point where the browser can become unresponsive for multiple seconds.
A solution to this is outright disabling images, but this breaks some websites (for example, hacker news relies on GIFs for comment indentation).
A more elegant solution would be to make a keybind to toggle images on or off, to do so add the following line to
~/.w3m/keymap
:
keymap i COMMAND "SET_OPTION display_image=toggle ; RESHAPE"
See also
Homepage
Github repository
w3m.rocks
A vim-like configuration for w3m
w3m plugins