ELinks

ELinks
An older version of this article rendered in ELinks
Original author(s)	Petr Baudiš, Jonas Fonseca
Developer(s)	Witold Filipczyk
Initial release	March 2, 2002;23 years ago (2002-03-02)
Stable release	0.18.0 / December 26, 2024;6 months ago (2024-12-26)
Preview release	0.18.0rc1 / December 7, 2024;6 months ago (2024-12-07)
Repository	github.com/rkd77/elinks
Written in	C, C++
Operating system	DOS, Linux, Windows
Available in	English, Polish, Danish, French, Serbian, Hungarian, Czech, German,
Type	Text-based web browser
License	GPL 2.0 only
Website	github.com/rkd77/elinks

ELinks is a text-based web browser for the operating systems DOS, Linux, and Windows. It is free and open-source software with a GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0 only.

History

It began in late 2001 as an experimental fork by Petr Baudiš of the Links Web browser, hence the E in the name. ^[1] Since then, the E has come to stand for Enhanced or Extended. ^[2] On 1 September 2004, Baudiš handed maintainership of the project over to Danish developer Jonas Fonseca, citing a lack of time and interest and a desire to spend more time coding rather than reviewing and organising releases. ^[3]

On 17 March 2017, OpenBSD removed ELinks from its ports tree, citing concerns with security issues and lack of responsiveness from the developers. ^[4]

On 17 November 2017, ELinks was forked into another program named felinks, meaning forked elinks. On 1 December 2020, the felinks repository on GitHub was renamed to elinks, with permission from Baudiš, as the old ELinks was not being actively maintained. ^[5]

elinks is being actively maintained: preview version 0.18.0rc1 was released 7 December 2024, ^[6] while stable version 0.18.0 was released 25 December 2024. ^[7]

Features

• HTTP and Proxy authentication
• Persistent HTTP cookies
• Support for browser scripting in Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua and GNU Guile ^[8]
• Tabs (though still text mode) ^[8]
• HTML tables and HTML frames ^[8]
• Background download with queueing
• Some support for Cascading Style Sheets ^[8]
• Some support for ECMAScript by using Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine ^[8]
• Editing of text boxes in external text editor
• Mouse support, with wheel scroll
• Colour text display
• Protocols supported:
  • local files, Finger, Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP, Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), File Service Protocol (FSP), Server Message Block (SMB), Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)
  • experimental: BitTorrent, gopher, gemini, ^[3] nntp

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• Text-based web browser
• List of web browsers
• Comparison of web browsers

References

1. Baudiš, Petr (2001-10-28). "[Announce] Experimental Links Tree". Gmane . Archived from the original on 2009-02-27. Retrieved 2008-10-28.
2. "The history and evolution of the Links browsers". ELinks. Archived from the original on 2011-07-18. Retrieved 2010-12-14.
3. Fonseca, Jonas (2004-12-24). "[elinks-users][Announce] ELinks-0.10.0 (Thelma)". Linux From Scratch . Archived from the original on 2019-02-24. Retrieved 2019-02-24.
4. Barrett, Edd (2017-03-17). "Remove www/elinks from the ports tree". MARC . Archived from the original on 2021-10-22. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
5. Filipczyk, Witold (2017-11-11). "rkd77/elinks: Fork of elinks". GitHub . Archived from the original on 2020-12-13. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
6. Filipczyk, Witold (2024-12-07). "Release v0.18.0rc1 · rkd77/elinks". GitHub . Archived from the original on 2025-02-20. Retrieved 2025-03-02.
7. Filipczyk, Witold (2024-12-26). "Release v0.18.0: rkd77/elinks". GitHub . Archived from the original on 2025-02-11. Retrieved 2025-03-02.
8. Bolso, Erik Inge (2005-03-08). "2005 Text Mode Browser Roundup". Linux Journal . Archived from the original on 2017-12-14. Retrieved 2010-08-05.

External links

• Official website