Comment by xelxebar
2 days ago
One of my favorite pieces of software is edbrowse[0]. Perhaps surprisingly, I find it quite useful:
- Main developer is blind, so accessibility has priority;
- Easily scriptable; think automating captive portal clickthroughs;
- Reading articles (e.g. Wikipedia) feels closer to reading a book;
- It even supports JavaScript to a degree!
- The affordances of line-oriented editing carry over nicely.
In particular, when using line-oriented interfaces, it's quite natural to build up a small collection of context-dependent snippets from documentation, source code, sample code, whatever. Putting a small collage of these on the screen is effortless and an experience I do miss with other UI paradigms.
The main developer appears to tinker on the project daily and is quite nice to chat with over on libera's #edbrowse. The project does have a small, dedicated following, but I wish more people knew about it!
edbrowse is awesome. I fear that most people, like OP in this case, don’t really understand the difference between "TUI" (where a terminal is used to display a GUI) and "CLI", where every interaction is a written command resulting in a output.
I’ve a perfect sight myself but I really like the comfort of linearity with CLI: I ask my computer something, I receive an answer.
(that’s probably why I’m developping my own CLI browser but is more graphical and less advanced than edbrowse)
> I fear that most people, like OP in this case, don’t really understand the difference between "TUI" (where a terminal is used to display a GUI) and "CLI", where every interaction is a written command resulting in a output.
I'm not sure how you could infer that, since OP didn't mention "TUI" or "GUI" or "CLI" anywhere in this post, and a text-based browser UI could come in either form.
> my own CLI browser but is more graphical
So based on the first paragraph, I would’ve assumed “CLI” and “graphical” were mutually exclusive? Did you in fact mean to type “TUI” here? Or is your program something like a hybrid between command-based input and graphical output?
No, Offpunk it's command line driven, it just happens it can output images due to sixel support (and maybe in a near future with the w3m's image displaying tool).
2 replies →
> Main developer is blind, so accessibility has priority;
Never thought about it before, but doing development work as a blind person sounds extremely impressive.
Vision is just such a fast and easy way to acquire information. Without it, it seems quite difficult to check your existing code, easily read prior documentation, take notes, and just various other conveniences that one take for granted.
I'm sure there are various tools and methods to ameliorate these problems, but still.
When I think about much of what blind people are able to achieve across domains, it's extremely impressive.
Looks cool, thanks for recommending it.
I usually go with w3m for my weirder needs that lie somewhere between a pure HTTP client and a regular web browser, this seems like it might be even more convenient sometimes.
> The history directory contains information on the history of edbrowse, how it came to be and what it is trying to accomplish. This includes a wikipedia article, written in markup. It was deleted by the wikipedia maintainers, for lack of sources. If edbrowse is described in a book or mainstream magazine in the future, perhaps this article can be reintroduced
I think you nailed the drive behind my ~3 decades of Emacs use: "I can get at all the text" (possibly above the customization/automation benefits despite this being the "advanced" pov above "it's just a text editor isn't it?"
I used to use that to fetch odd Japanese translated ROMs from CD Romance. Inb4 some Copyright holder says "buy them legally"... these games won't be released in the West ever.
In Europe most people played Earthbound (and USA only releases for SNES/MD) under emulators. That's how Nintendo put it in the Super Smash Bros roster. They say the hate emulation; but these tools cemented themselves into retroemulation like no other system, and helped to bring new sagas to the West. For free. You say you lost money because of retro-piracy? You got free marketing for physical scraps technically resting in a warehouse.
Altough nowadays I'm 100% pro libre gaming; tons of indie/FOSS philosophy overlap: FreedroidRPG, Battle for Wesnoth, Nethack/Slashem, ReTux, SuperTux2...
Back to edbrowse, it's a mail, irc and SQL client too; and you can script it, a la ed/vi, so you can do magic here.