From: Michael G Schwern Date: 22:08 on 20 May 2005 Subject: links Let me first start off with the obvious. "Is there a good command line web browser?" "Yeah, use links." "I've used lynx, it sucks." "Not lynx, L-I-N-K-S!" Google, when asked for "links", actually has the links home page as the first hit! Didn't expect that, lost a reason to hate links. Now back to our hate. How do I copy text from links? For some reason this is the only command line application that refuses to allow me to highlight and copy anything. GRAH! So even though links' rendering is superior I'm stuck using lynx.
From: Chris Devers Date: 22:27 on 20 May 2005 Subject: Re: links On Fri, 20 May 2005, Michael G Schwern wrote: > How do I copy text from links? For some reason this is the only > command line application that refuses to allow me to highlight and > copy anything. GRAH! It's probably cheating, but... $ links -dump http://google.com Google Web Images Groups News Froogle Local more >> ________________________________________________________ Advanced Search [ Google Search ] [ I'm Feeling Lucky ] Preferences Language Tools Advertising Programs - About Google (c)2005 Google - Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages $ links -dump http://google.com > google_dump.txt $ links -dump http://google.com | vim - $ Voila!
From: Chris Ball Date: 22:54 on 20 May 2005 Subject: Re: links >> On Fri, 20 May 2005 14:08:49, Michael G Schwern <schwern@xxxxx.xxx> said: > How do I copy text from links? Hold down shift while you drag. - Chris.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 23:17 on 20 May 2005 Subject: Re: links On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 10:54:17PM +0100, Chris Ball wrote: > >> On Fri, 20 May 2005 14:08:49, Michael G Schwern <schwern@xxxxx.xxx> said: > > > How do I copy text from links? > > Hold down shift while you drag. Oh, of course. Just like every other piece of software out there... oh wait NOTHING WORKS THIS WAY! GRAH! I'd rather it was the other way around, hold down shift to click on links. Or configurable in one of them fancy curses menus. PS Thanks.
From: Smylers Date: 07:24 on 21 May 2005 Subject: Re: links Michael G Schwern writes: > On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 10:54:17PM +0100, Chris Ball wrote: > > > > > On Fri, 20 May 2005 14:08:49, Michael G Schwern > > > > <schwern@xxxxx.xxx> said: > > > > > How do I copy text from links? > > > > Hold down shift while you drag. > > Oh, of course. Just like every other piece of software out there... > oh wait NOTHING WORKS THIS WAY! GRAH! Um, actually I find most things work that way. Certainly in 'Pine', 'SLRN', 'Vim', and any other terminal app which snags the mouse for itself, holding down shift gets back bypasses the app and gets back the terminal's X selection operations. This is sufficiently the case that I now habitually hold down Shift for copy and paste even when unnecessary, because it always works. For small values of "always". The trouble with this habit is if I run 'Vim' with its own gui, you have to _not_ hold down shift to get copy and paste, cos 'Vim' now has better ideas over what it wants to do with the shifted versions. Hate! > I'd rather it was the other way around, hold down shift to click on > links. Or configurable in one of them fancy curses menus. Check out your terminal's configuration then -- that might be possible, but the app won't have any say in the matter. Smylers
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 12:31 on 21 May 2005 Subject: Re: links > Um, actually I find most things work that way. Certainly in 'Pine', > 'SLRN', 'Vim', and any other terminal app which snags the mouse for > itself, holding down shift gets back bypasses the app and gets back the > terminal's X selection operations. Oh, good, we're back to the topic of hateful software. Terminal mouse support is so badly implemented and designed, and you can't depend on it even if it wasn't... because sometimes it's compiled in, sometimes it isn't, sometimes it's allergic to screen or telnet, sometimes it's not... that the only rational thing to do is turn it off. Except that there's no way to just do that globally, you have to fiddle with each app's configuration until you find its "no mouse" option, or you have to figure out a TERM for each shell on each machine that'll leave you enough capabilities to let the app work without making it go "Whoa! I can use the mouse!". So I generally find that the best way to deal with terminal apps that snag the mouse is to use something else that doesn't. Compounding this is the fact that XTerm sucks so badly that only the fact that every other X11 terminal program sucks so much more keeps me using it. I know a lot of people like rxvt, but I'm damned if I can tell why: it's managed to be even less user friendly than XTerm, which is a pretty amazing thing by itself. And extended versions of rxvt aren't any better... you'd think that improving the user interface would be the first thing people would do, but NO, they extend it to do things like putting a unique backdrop picture in each window, or something else I can't even imagine wanting. And then there's newer replacements for XTerm. Some of them look like they'd be pretty good, but you need to install about half a gigabyte of Gnome or KDE, most of which was written by people who never used anything but Linux and unless someone's already ported them to your platform it's a major project to get them to work... and when you're done you've got something with maybe 30 or 40 times the footprint of XTerm. Even the ones described as "lightweight" are bloated things with half a dozen obscure dependencies. I don't want tabs or toolbars or menu bars, I just want something that looks like xterm-without-tektronix-support to the application, looks like xterm-without-athena-weirdness to me, and doesn't require me to exit it, fiddle with configuration and command line, and restart it just to change a simple option. But is there anything like that? Hell no. Hateful things. And to get back on topic, that means that if the app has grabbed the mouse it provides a visible indication of that fact, AND it lets me override that grab RIGHT NOW, FOR THIS WINDOW or ALL THE TIME, FOR ALL WINDOWS. A menu time to locate the develope of the app and apply jwz's patented audio-cock technology would be a nice extra.
From: Luke Kanies Date: 22:08 on 21 May 2005 Subject: Re: links On Sat, 21 May 2005, Peter da Silva wrote: > A menu time to locate the develope of the app and apply jwz's patented > audio-cock technology would be a nice extra. [Off-topic, a bit] Ironically, attempts at searching for what jwz's patented audio-cock technology turned up a similar quote from Peter on nearly the identical subject: "terminals and urls and copying" http://muttley.hates-software.com/2004/03/24/29bc4690.html "The display manager would also be responsible for the presentation of most other standard controls, and any developer who tried to fake them by using bitmaps without an airtight technical case would get to experience JWZ's audio-cock technology." The original mention of the audio-cock is here: http://www.jwz.org/doc/linuxvideo.html Makali wrote: Whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls. Just thought I'd share the results of confusion-resolving research.
From: Juerd Date: 23:46 on 20 May 2005 Subject: Re: links Michael G Schwern skribis 2005-05-20 14:08 (-0700): > "Is there a good command line web browser?" Browsing with a command line is a hell of a job. I prefer a full screen character based interface that does useful things just after I release a key. > "Yeah, use links." Yeah, use w3m. > "I've used lynx, it sucks." I've used links, it sucks. > How do I copy text from links? For some reason this is the only command line > application that refuses to allow me to highlight and copy anything. GRAH! Well, gpm and xterms work in the same way. If something takes over mouse control, you can access the selection and pasting thingies by holding shift. This hate shouldn't be directed at links, because all terminal based full screen interfaces that have mouse control work like this, because it's not the application that handles this. It's the terminal. > So even though links' rendering is superior I'm stuck using lynx. w3m's rendering is even better, IMO. It has several other things that I like better than links's way of doing the same things, so my default terminal based browser is w3m now, not links or lynx anymore. In w3m you can disable the mouse stuff. (Short guide to not hating w3m the first minute you try it: access the options, and enable frames rendering, disable mouse support, enable displaying of link urls, enable cookies. Oh, and if graphics in a terminal freak you out, disable those too.) Juerd
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 00:02 on 21 May 2005 Subject: Re: links On Sat, May 21, 2005 at 12:46:49AM +0200, Juerd wrote: > (Short guide to not hating w3m the first minute you try it: access the > options, and enable frames rendering, disable mouse support, enable > displaying of link urls, enable cookies. Oh, and if graphics in a > terminal freak you out, disable those too.) Whatever its doing rxvt doesn't handle it. Just a lot of [5;1H which look like ANSI escapes to me and I don't see any way to shut that off. xterm does better in that it at least doesn't display the ANSI escapes but CNN.com comes out looking like hell with lots of extended bolds and underlines and its pretty much unreadable. Eterm looks just as bad. http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/tmp/hate_w3m.tiff That's links in the lower right. Everything else is w3m. So what else do I have to disable?
From: Juerd Date: 00:11 on 21 May 2005 Subject: Re: links Michael G Schwern skribis 2005-05-20 16:02 (-0700): > http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/tmp/hate_w3m.tiff Horrible! > So what else do I have to disable? I have no idea. Although I use w3m on quite a lot of machines, I never saw it like that. (All of these use the same w3m, from Debian. I'm so spoiled.) Juerd
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