Links -- a port of the graphical web browser for Plan 9


News:
20/05/2005:

5/03/2005: 28/02/2005: 11/06/2004: 28/02/2004: 19/12/2003: 17/12/2003: 15/12/2003: 13/12/2003: 11/12/2003: 10/12/2003:

This is a port of the Links web browser using only its graphical web browser capabilities (i.e. it doesn't run in a terminal, but in a rio window). The version the port is based on is 2.1pre14.


Download:

links-varfont.tgz -- source, 2MB.

links-ape.tgz -- source, 2MB.

links-386.gz -- binary for 386, 730KB.


Build:

    % hget http://mirtchovski.com/p9/links/links-ape.tgz | gunzip | tar xv
    % cd links-ape
    % mk
    % mk install
This will put a single binary called links in $home/bin/386... The binary is ~2MB (now without font_data[]).

Screenshots:

Plan 9 home page Slashdot Google News Kenji's site Bulgarian News The Register

Why:

There have been many different solutions to web browsing in Plan 9, mostly involving either horribly outdated browsers (i and mothra), installing of a different operating system or having a separate machine on which to run the browser via vnc.

This projects attempts to bring a reasonably up-to-date browser as a native application. Links renders pages in a readable manner (most of the time) and with features such as JavaScript support, UTF rendering of non-english text pages, etc. becomes a good solution for light web browsing. It is released in a slightly mangled state in hopes that others will chip in to iron the few bugs that remain out of the differences between Plan 9 and Lunixland.


What's there:

The browser works in its basic state.


What isn't:

All of the below are in the TODO list. Any help is appreciated:


Bugs:

Any help hunting those is greatly appreciated:


Port details:

Note: these are no longer relevant. Included here for your information only.Here are the details of the Plan 9 graphics driver implementation:


License:

The original source is GNU. The Plan 9 driver is IDCLMA (I Don't Care, Leave Me Alone).


Documentation:

Links has a man page which this distribution will not install on your system. You can find documentation on Links' home page, linked to from the Help menu of a running instance.

Your bookmarks and configuration files are stored in /tmp/.links instead of $home/.links

Plan 9-only commands:


Last Modified: May 20, 2005
mirtchovski at gmail