Changing terminal and browser

Posted on May 24, 2022

I spend a lot of time on the terminal: using alpine to send emails and using vim/neovim to edit tex files and code. For at least a decade if not longer, I have been using UXTerm as my terminal emulator. At some stage I spent some time configuring UXTerm fonts and color schemes to what I like, and I have been using it ever since. Recently, I started experiencing some weird issues with UXTerm, which forced me down a rabbit hole.

I did not use my office workstation for almost a year and a half due to covid. When I returned back, I did a system update, and started working. But every so often (once an hour or so), I started seeing weird flickering of the terminal. This was particularly common when I was composing emails (neovim open inside alpine). Most of the times, this scrolling stopped on pressing CTRL-L but it was annoying to say the least. I tried searching online for what was happening, but could not find a solution that worked. Surprisingly, my laptop, which has the same distro and the same setup never had an isse.

Anyways, I thought that it was time to try out a new terminal emulator. After reading a bit about the different options, this post of the notcurses author convinced me to test kitty first. After spending half an hour going over the documentation, I could configure everything (fonts, colorscheme, copy and paste behavior) as I liked. I have been using it on my office workstation for 3-4 hours and no more flickering.

The story would have ended with “and they lived happily ever after”, until I noticed that images where not displayed when viewing HTML emails in alpine. I am sure you are screaming, “What!”. So, let me take a step back and explain.

I use alpine (which is a text based email program) for reading emails. Occasionally, I get an email which has some images or HTML formatting (such as tables), which doesn’t display nicely in alpine. In such cases, I simply do ‘V’ + ‘Down-Arrow’ + ‘Enter’ to display the text/html portion of the email. I have configured my mailcap file to display text/html using w3m, which is a text-based browser which can display inline images in the terminal. The inline image display of w3m was not working on kitty.

Back to DuckDuckGo. There was an issue on kitty’s github page where the author essentially said that w3m uses a hack to display images in the terminal and he is not going to support that hack. So, time to see if there are any other text-based browsers that are still maintained and support inline images.

In the past I had used lynx, but that doesn’t support inline images. elinks hasn’t been updated in almost a decade, but links is actively maintained and supports inline images!

So, I installed links using pacman -S links and tried to open a website with images:

$links -g <website>
Graphics not enabled when compiling

Hmm…, so I downloaded the PKGBUILD of links using

asp checkout links

and realized that links PKGBUILD does something unusual. It first compiles the package with graphics support, renames the executable as xlinks and then recompiles without graphics support. So, all I needed to do was use xlinks -g in my mailcap. But … that opens a new X window to display the results! So, effectively xlinks -g is a lightweight browser.

The interesting thing is that I did not notice that links -g is a graphical browser rather than a text browser until I wrote this blog post. The reason is that I use a tiling windows manager (i3m) and normally the workspace where I am running alpine is two columns of windows: one with email and another terminal and the other with slack and a few other terminal. Both columns are in stacked mode. So, when xlinks -g opened a new X window, it completely covered alpine and I thought that the content was being displayed as part of alpine.

Now, the reason that I pipe email messages to a text-based browser rather than firefox is to keep distractions in check. Typically, with text based browsers, I just read the message and don’t start browsing the web. I am going to see if I can maintain the same distraction free habit with xlinks. If not, then I’ll be back to square one.

This entry was posted in CLI and tagged xterm, kitty, links, w3m.