Popular desktop browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Chrome won’t do much good when you have an abysmal internet connection. While text-based browsers like w3m are not very visually appealing, they are your best bet when your internet speeds harken back to the days of dial-up.
What Is w3m?
w3m is a free and open-source text-based browser that allows users to surf the web from a terminal emulator window. Like other text-based browsers, w3m renders the web in plain text without styling and scripts. However, it stands out from other text-based browsers due to its support for tables, cookies, frames, inline images, and authentication.
By ignoring CSS and JavaScript, w3m can load pages faster than graphical web browsers, making it suitable for low bandwidth connections. It offers tabbed browsing and in-depth customization options.
Apart from being the best choice for a poor network connection, the w3m browser is perfect for developers who want to keep their workflow completely in the terminal and people using less powerful hardware like Raspberry Pis to surf the internet.
The original w3m project began in 1995 as a lightweight, fast-loading alternative to Netscape. The developer has since abandoned it, but Tatsuya Kinoshita maintains a fork of the original version. The name “w3m” is short for “WWW-wo-miru” which means to see the WWW.
Besides being an internet browser, w3m also works as a Linux pager for browsing local documents on your computer.
How to Install w3m on Windows and Linux
w3m is easy to install and doesn’t take up much storage space (about 3MB). It is compatible with Linux, Windows (with Cygwin), and macOS (with Homebrew).
Windows Installation
To use w3m on Windows, you must first install the Cygwin emulator. Cygwin is a free and open-source Unix-like environment and terminal interface for Microsoft Windows.
To install Cygwin and w3m, follow these steps:
- Download the Cygwin installer. Run the installer and select the Install from Internet option. Leave the other options as default.
- In the Select Packages window, use the Search box to find the w3m package. In the New column, choose the latest version using the dropdown icon. Click Next to continue the installation. After installation, you can add desktop and Start Menu icons.
- Once the installation is complete, open the Cygwin terminal and enter w3m to check if the browser has been installed.
Linux Installation
w3m comes pre-installed on some Linux distributions, but it can also be installed via apt install. To install w3m on Linux, open the terminal and enter:
sudo apt-get install w3m 
Enter your password if prompted, and type Y to continue. The installation won’t take long to complete. You should now be able to browse the web using the w3m web browser.
How to Use w3m
To open Google.com with the w3m browser, enter the following command in the terminal:
w3m google.com w3m will then open a bare-bones version of the Google webpage interface with text and clickable links. You can use a keyboard or mouse to navigate on w3m. Googler is another terminal-based tool that allows you to run Google searches from your Linux terminal.
Pressing Tab and Shift + Tab allows you to move between clickable links, buttons, and text boxes on the page. You can also use the cursor to select elements on the webpage. Press Enter to open a hyperlink or input text into a highlighted textbox.
I entered makeuseof.com in the text box and clicked the Google Search button next to the text box (Tab, then Enter).
The Google Search Results page in plain text looks unfamiliar and a little daunting. However, it is not so complicated when you get the hang of it. Text excerpts from the web pages are white, while links are blue by default. At the bottom of the window, there is a Back button (
W3m offers two display modes: color and monochrome. The color mode is on by default, and you can switch to a monochrome interface in the options. Press O to open the Option Setting Panel, a long list of options that you can change to customize your w3m experience.
Most of the navigation options are available by pressing the right-click mouse button. You can find other w3m key commands with H (Shift + H). When you are done, use Shift + Q or Ctrl + Z to quit the program.
Alternatives to w3m
w3m is not the only text-based browser out there. There are several other alternatives, such as Lynx and Elinks. Launched in 1992, Lynx is the oldest browser still being maintained and has considerably more documentation than w3m. However, it does not offer tabbed browsing and cannot render images without external software. Elinks is a more recent text-based browser and supports much the same functionality as w3m, but it can be slower to load.
w3m browser won’t stream YouTube videos or open X (Twitter), just to name a few. So, it is not a complete replacement for a modern desktop browser with a graphic user interface. However, it works extremely well when looking up a document or reading a blog post with a weak network connection.
