I can understand using only the keyboard, because it's faster and easier to automate and whatnot, but giving up on a normal browser just to be "in text mode"? Why not Firefox + Vimperator, for example?
Typically in a tiling window manager you will have a main window open with, say, an editor, and other windows open with man pages or documentation.
Sometimes you just want to browse through something that is text, online documentation for example. In a tiling window manager, your browser might be in a window that is, say, only a quarter of the screen's real estate, so you definitely don't want the browser to be filled with cruft like scroll bars or menus. Since the viewport is so small, you want all of it to be "content" and none of it to be "browser". So a text browser makes a lot of sense.
I do this all the time, usually with elinks. Mind you, I still have chrome open in a different group (or tab).
He does use Firefox, for sites that don't work in w3m.
My setup on Linux is pretty similar, and I use w3m a fair bit, especially for reading documentation--it's fast, and for text-heavy sites suits me better than a graphical browser.
That said, doing without a 'normal' browser entirely seems a bit masochistic/text-obsessive to me too.
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Why would you do that?
I can understand using only the keyboard, because it's faster and easier to automate and whatnot, but giving up on a normal browser just to be "in text mode"? Why not Firefox + Vimperator, for example?
Typically in a tiling window manager you will have a main window open with, say, an editor, and other windows open with man pages or documentation.
Sometimes you just want to browse through something that is text, online documentation for example. In a tiling window manager, your browser might be in a window that is, say, only a quarter of the screen's real estate, so you definitely don't want the browser to be filled with cruft like scroll bars or menus. Since the viewport is so small, you want all of it to be "content" and none of it to be "browser". So a text browser makes a lot of sense.
I do this all the time, usually with elinks. Mind you, I still have chrome open in a different group (or tab).
Google "uzbl".
He does use Firefox, for sites that don't work in w3m.
My setup on Linux is pretty similar, and I use w3m a fair bit, especially for reading documentation--it's fast, and for text-heavy sites suits me better than a graphical browser.
That said, doing without a 'normal' browser entirely seems a bit masochistic/text-obsessive to me too.