Firelinks

Firelinks lets you mirror your Firefox browsing session in elinks.

Benefits:

  • Use Firefox's graphical interface to navigate the web visually
  • Use elinks' austere textual interface to read content with more concentration and less distraction
  • Save plain text versions of webpages with elinks' "Save formatted document" command

Prerequisites

  • Linux (does not work yet on OS X)
  • elinks
  • Firefox 3 or higher
  • Ruby (tested on 1.9.2)

Install

gem install firelinks

Try running it by typing firelinks on the command line. fIf you get an error message saying that firelinks is missing, then you probably have a PATH issue. Try one of these workarounds:

  • Try installing with sudo gem install firelinks
  • Put the directory where Rubygems installs executables on your PATH

To upgrade firelinks to a newer version, just repeat the installation procedure.

How to use it

Start Firefox. Then start Firelinks by opening a terminal and typing

firelinks

Firelinks starts Ruby process in your Terminal window, which in turn starts and manages an elinks session that displays the current webpage.

As you visit pages in Firefox, you should see them should be loaded automatically in the elinks session.

To quit Firelinks, just press CTRL-C (instead of the normal quit key sequence for elinks).

Bug reports and feature requests

Please submit here:

About the developer

My name is Daniel Choi. I specialize in Ruby, Rails, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and iOS development. I am based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and the little software company I run with Hoony Youn is called Kaja Software.