Re: w3m -> standard, lynx -> optional
On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 09:41:34AM +0000, Miciah Dashiel Butler Masters wrote:
> Have you any examples of how ELinks might better integrate with Unix
> and cater to 'power users'?
Mostly my points below, which you give very good replies to. Also, I
don't know if (e)links has regexp search; if it doesn't, that would
definitely make it more appropriate for power users.
> I've used ELinks as my primary browser for a few years, and I've
> even contributed a little code, so my knowledge of it is fairly
> extensive, while I know relatively little about W3M. I'll proceed
> to address your points.
Yes, you make a quite assuring case of "links being able to do
everything w3m can". Of course, configurability is not (always) an
excuse for bad defaults; but it's nice to see that links is becoming
better and better in all aspects.
It's very nice of you to share this information, by the way. Many of
your answers I could have spent a *lot* of time looking for.
> usage (i.e., without -dump or -source). I can file a bug report
> (bugzilla.elinks.or.cz); maybe it isn't too difficult to fix.
Please feel free to do so... I wonder how many people actually use
HTML-aware pagers after all. For me, it's very useful - it's a great
way to test CGI scripts, for example.
> > (5) w3m doesn't have incremental display and isn't very
> > "thread-oriented" otherwise either. Whether this is a pro or a con
> > depends on where you come from.
> It is a con when one wants to load a 400KB CVSweb page
> from the ELinks maintainer's server over his microwave link.
Yes, and it's a pro when you want to read text in a table without
getting it suddenly reflowed.
> When we add modal editing, we can include an option to immediately start
> an external editor when one indicates that one wishes to edit the text
> in a text area; would this suffice?
It would, but it's always the same problem: default configuration has to
be made for some kind of user specifically, you can't make a default
configuration please a beginner and a power user equally.
> How about this? |INTERNAL("Could not assing boundary");| It once was
> 'Counld not assing boundary', and the corrected spelling for 'could'
> drops some charm, but I still love that 'assing'!
:) The other examples are quite amazing, too...
> When I read the original debian-devel announcement, I thought that W3M
> was a reasonable choice over ELinks: ELinks has--IMHO--more haphazard
Funny we should both recommend one another's favourite browsers...
The most important reason I think some version of links should probably
be the default text-mode browser is that their UI resembles that of
graphical browsers. I also think that graphical-browser standard UI is
quite flawed, as are the lynx keybingings (which links has copied). But
at least, they're easier to guess for somebody who begins to use the
browser.
> end with many tabs open, and W3M releases for minutes at a time with
> only one tab, so I have no idea what I'm talking about.
Nondestructive history and tabs serve partially the same purpose, by the
way.
Panu
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