How good it would be if you surf the internet merely on a terminal. This is possible by means of browsers which can work from the command line. One of such browser which when installed is available to use in terminals is Elinks.
ELinks is basically a text mode WWW browser, supporting colors, table rendering, background downloading, menu driven configuration interface, tabbed browsing and slim code.
Here at Ibmi Media, as part of our Server Management Services, we regularly help our Customers to perform related Open Source Software Installation queries.
In this context, we shall look into how to install elinks on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS machine.
Elinks package is available in Ubuntu repositories. So to install it simply run the below command:
$ sudo apt install elinks
Once installed you will be able to run the browser from the terminal.
After installing ELinks, you can run it with the below command:
$ elinks
Once the connection is established, you will notice the Elinks screen on your terminal. Your terminal will change into a browser. It will be fully functional and render all of the text of a website.
When elinks starts then it starts with an address bar in the middle. We will simply enter a website into it and hit enter to go to the specific URL. In case you do not want to surf the internet immediately you can always cancel it.
Also you can enter a website and hit enter to begin surfing the web.
You will need to use the standard apt command to remove Elinks from your system:
$ sudo apt remove elinks
This article covers how to install, run, and remove Elinks browser on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. In fact, Elinks runs in the terminal. Not only it saves bandwidth but also consumes a few system resources. On a server where resources are always constrained, elinks can be the best choice to access the web.
Step by step installation of elinks:
1: Update system:
$ sudo apt-get update
2: Install: elinks
Ater updating the OS run following command to install the package:
$ sudo apt-get install elinks
How to Completely remove elinks with all configuration files from Ubuntu?
Following command should be used with care as it deletes all the configuration files and data:
$ sudo apt-get purge elinks
or you can use following command also:
$ sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove elinks
Above command will remove all the configuration files and data associated with elinks package. You can can't recover the delete data, so, use this command with care.