Firelinks

Firelinks automatically mirrors your Firefox browsing session in elinks.

Benefits:

• Use Firefox's graphical interface to navigate the web visually
• Use elinks' austere textual interface to read content with more concentration and less distraction
• Save clean plain text versions of webpages with elinks' "Save formatted document" command

Prerequisites

• Supported platforms: Linux and OS X
• elinks
• Firefox 3 or higher (tested on Firefox 5)
• sqlite3 version 3.7.4 or higher
• Ruby (tested on 1.9.2)

Install

gem install firelinks

Try running it by typing firelinks on the command line. If you get an error message saying that firelinks is missing, then you probably have a PATH issue. Try one of these workarounds:

• Try installing with sudo gem install firelinks
• Put the directory where Rubygems installs executables on your PATH

To upgrade firelinks to a newer version, just repeat the installation procedure.

How to use it

Start Firefox. Then start Firelinks by opening a terminal and typing

firelinks

Firelinks starts Ruby process in your Terminal window, which in turn starts and manages an elinks session that displays the current webpage.

As you visit pages in Firefox, you should see them load automatically in the elinks session.

To quit Firelinks, just press CTRL-C (instead of the normal quit key sequence for elinks).

Troubleshooting

If Firelinks starts an elinks session but doesn't seem to be updating it as you hit new pages in Firefox, you may be missing sqlite3 or in need of a newer version.

Run sqlite3 -version to make sure you have a recent version of sqlite3 (3.7.4 or later).

Also, note that elinks keeps its own cookies and session data separately from Firefox. So if you're logged into nytimes.com in Firefox, you'll need to log in at nytimes.com in elinks to ensure that you can access the same content in both browsers.

Bug reports and feature requests

Please submit here:

• https://github.com/danchoi/firelinks/issues

About the developer

My name is Daniel Choi. I specialize in Ruby, Rails, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and iOS development. I am based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and the little software company I run with Hoony Youn is called Kaja Software.

• Company Email: [email protected]
• Twitter: @danchoi
• Personal Email: [email protected]
• My Homepage: http://danielchoi.com/software