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Cool Program: w3m

It supports tabbed browsing.

Sometimes you just have to stop and take a look around your file system. If you are like me, you'll have a Linux system or a cygwin system with everything installed.

And one place to look at is /usr/bin. A game I play when I was bored is to try to memorize what each executable there does. Once in a while, a new program comes along and I go "what does that do?"

That's how I discovered w3m a while ago. It comes with the net install of cygwin. It's a text-based web browser in the tradition of Lynx and links. It got my attention when I right clicked on a link in it. A context menu, of course text-based, popped up. And one of the menu items is the "Open in new Tab." "Nice!" I remember saying to myself.

Well, I've been using it ever since. It's especially handy for such things as README.html files, where a

[weiqi@gao] $ w3m README.html

command will open the file right there, just like

[weiqi@gao] $ less README

had the file been a plain ASCII file.

Here it is in action, with four tabs open:




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