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I use w3m (it doesn't have a graphical interface) as much as possible because I got tired of the complexity of the web. It's also much faster than Firefox; it loads pages instantly while in Firefox there is always a small delay.

When I have to, I use Firefox.



Aside from HN on my mobile (Chrome), it's lynx or w3m or emacs-w3m for me. I especially agree with your further comment below about "21" - I'm quite guilty (extending onto my command lines line as well).


Interesting. How can you manage browsing without a mouse. Looks like quite a hassle.


Tab and enter to click links. When there are too many links in the way I sometimes use j and k to go down or up lines to skip them or '/' to search for the text of the link. It's also possible to use numbers before j and k (or any other commands) to go down or up multiple lines. So if I see that a link is 1 decimeter below the cursor, I press "21j" to go down 21 lines which puts me close to the link and then I can usually just press tab once or twice and enter. The reason for 21 (or 12 or 31 and so on) instead of 20 is that 2 and 1 are close to each other on the keyboard so I can easily hit them with my left hand while putting my right index finger on the j key.

Reading text is easy, just page down/up which can be combined with arrow keys to go down/up half a page. Example: page down + arrow up goes down a page and then up half a page because it puts the cursor at the top of the page when I hit page down. It's also possible to scroll down one line with J and up one line with K.

Managing multiple pages is easy too. I can open a tab with T or a link in a new tab with ctrl+t and close the tab with ctrl+q and switch tab with { and }. I can go backward and forward in history by pressing s and selecting a page or just back once with B.

There are just a few things that are a bit annoying. When you open a link in a new tab, the browser is not responsive until the page has loaded or you abort it with ctrl+c. And some pages are just really bad and hard to read or navigate with a browser like this because they rely too much on javascript or css.


Just reading your comment exhausted me, this feels like such a waste of time and a massive inconvenience.

Any time you save by loading pages faster is lost a hundred folds by the inefficiency of the whole process.

All that comes to my mind is the "This Little Maneuver's Gonna Cost Us 51 Years" meme.




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