Linux Multimedia Hacks

Browse Graphical Sites from an xterm

Install the w3m-img extension and view web sites and their images from within a regular xterm.

This book talks a lot about the different types of multimedia on the Web. Generally speaking you want to use a standard web browser to access all of this content, but sometimes it can be useful to test your site against a text-based browser to see how your code holds up. Maybe you just like to browse the Web from a text browser for the sheer geek factor. Whatever the reason, text-based web browsers generally make you miss out on all of the multimedia content on the Web—even the images. In this hack I tell you how to use the w3m browser to look at web sites and their images from an xterm.

When you think about text-based web browsers, usually you think of a browser like lynx or links. Over the past few years, a new text-based web browser called w3m has started to get more use due to its support for complicated layouts, its vi-style navigation, and now, its support for in-line images. With this feature, w3m displays the web page and renders the images within the terminal itself.

It used to be that image rendering was a separate extension to w3m. Nowadays it is part of the full w3m project; however many distributions package the binary with image support in a separate package, so those who don’t want the image support can download a smaller binary. w3m is a popular project and has been around for a number of years, so your distribution should have packages ...