Firelinks
Firelinks automatically mirrors 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 clean plain text versions of webpages with elinks' "Save formatted document" command
Prerequisites
- Supported platforms: Linux and OS X
- elinks
- Firefox 3 or higher (tested on Firefox 5)
- sqlite3 version 3.7.4 or higher
- Ruby (tested on 1.9.2)
Install
gem install firelinks
Try running it by typing firelinks
on the command line. If 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 load automatically in the elinks session.
To quit Firelinks, just press CTRL-C
(instead of the normal quit key sequence for elinks).
Troubleshooting
If Firelinks starts an elinks session but doesn't seem to be updating it as you hit new pages in Firefox, you may be missing sqlite3 or in need of a newer version.
Run sqlite3 -version
to make sure you have a recent version of sqlite3 (3.7.4 or later).
Also, note that elinks keeps its own cookies and session data separately from Firefox. So if you're logged into nytimes.com in Firefox, you'll need to log in at nytimes.com in elinks to ensure that you can access the same content in both browsers.
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.
- Company Email: [email protected]
- Twitter: @danchoi
- Personal Email: [email protected]
- My Homepage: http://danielchoi.com/software