Waylon Walker

Posted on Jul 5, 2020

How does your blog look in plain text 🤔

#webdev #bash #discuss

I was recently logged into a remote server and needed to look up one of my blog posts. Feeling a bit lazy I just w3m https://waylonwalker.com. And to my surprise the homepage didn't look half bad, but the posts themself, actually look great. I love the terminal but am far from doing everything from the terminal. This may be a new way for me to peruse my own blogs.

My Homepage

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Top comments (7)

Corey Alexander • Jul 5 '20

Phew 😌

I was worried mine was gonna be worse, but its functional and doesn't look half bad! Tried lynx and w3m to compare results!

lynx

Lynx Notes: The colors seem to at least partially be coming from my CSS and the contrast is pretty bad on some of the text. I worked on that for in a browser before but might need to take a look into why this is happening here.

w3m

w3m Notes: I like the layout of the lynx home page better. This didn't line break as well as lynx did but its still workable, just not as easy to quickly parse down. But I think due to the contrast I find the actual blog post MUCH easier to read in w3m

Heiker • Jul 5 '20

I looked around and it turns out those colors lynx shows are from a "theme", the default color scheme. I have been playing around with the config file for the theme and made slightly better: here is the link.

Also, because I had nothing better to do I made myself a few function for my .zshrc

# Transform the arguments into a valid url querystring
urlencode() {
  local args="$@"
  jq -nr --arg v "$args" '$v|@uri'; 
}

# Query duckduckgo
duckduckgo() {
 lynx -lss=~/.config/lynx/lynx.lss "https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=$(urlencode "$@")"
}

To make it more convenient you can make an alias (or two).

alias ddg='duckduckgo'
alias '?'='duckduckgo'

Waylon Walker • Jul 5 '20

Gatsby for the win! Text-based browsers work surprisingly well with static generated sites.

Corey Alexander • Jul 5 '20

Ya it's been a while since I messed with Gatsby stuff and I didn't remember how good the no-js story was, so was more than happily surprised!

Been thinking of making sure the no-js experience wasn't awful so thanks for the kick in the right direction!

Tim Downey • Jul 5 '20

TIL about w3m. 🤯

Waylon Walker • Jul 5 '20 • Edited

An <hr> tag will generate horizontal rule lines in w3m.

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Jul 6 '20 • Edited

It seems to be OK. My intention was to maximize accessibility in the first place as well.

The only may-be-problematic part, is that it asks for several cookies...

DEV Community

How does your blog look in plain text 🤔

My Homepage

Post

Top comments (7)

lynx

w3m

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