web browsing tools
https://kinzler.com/me/webrowse
Webrowse is a tool for interfacing between a Mozilla (eg Firefox) or Chrome (as of version 1.8.0) web browser and the rest of a Unix/X11 environment. It can be used for convenient file or URL loading remote control, and for textual reference HTML markup. See the included man page for full details.
Also included in this package are `inbrowse` and `gowww`, two other tools built atop webrowse (or another similar program) that further facilitate creating interfaces between a web browser and other components of a Unix desktop, such as the X11 cut buffer, editors, mail and news readers, the user command line, etc.
In brief, `webrowse` takes a text or HTML file, browser command or URL and displays it with a running web browser, perhaps marking up any implicit URLs or paths in the text. `inbrowse` is a frontend to webrowse that reads the standard input and guesses the appropriate way to browse it. `gowww` is a convenience frontend to webrowse that usually lets you give simple, abbreviated commands to open a website or perform various web searches and lookups. For example, you can simply run `gowww slashdot` to browse <https://slashdot.com/>, or `gowww /:ucayali` to perform a web search about the Ucayali river.
Here's a sample nifty use for inbrowse that lets you hit <Control-TAB> in your TWM or CTWM managed X11 display to browse in a new window whatever is in the current X cut buffer, whether it's a URL, a word like "slashdot", some text or some HTML. This lets you select something to browse from almost any application. Add this to your .twmrc or .ctwmrc file:
"Tab" = c : all : !"cutbuf | inbrowse -w &"
`cutbuf` is another script that'll be needed, available at <https://kinzler.com/me/home.html#binp/cutbuf>.
Running `webrowse -h`, `inbrowse -h` and `gowww -h` will provide usage summaries.
Webrowse was featured in the Toolman column of the SAGE Feature section of the April 1998 ;login: magazine (page 28) of the USENIX Association. The article is available in PDF, HTML and text formats at <https://www.cs.duke.edu/~des/webrowse.html>.
"webrowse", "inbrowse" and "gowww" are scripts that you should be able to install as-is, ie executable in a directory in your PATH. Edit the first line of "webrowse", if necessary, to contain the proper path to your perl executable. A man page for webrowse in both troff ("webrowse.man") and HTML ("webrowse.html") format is supplied. You can install all these files manually as you wish or you can use the included Makefile. Just edit the top of the Makefile to your desires and then run:
make
make install
make install.man
webrowse
Copyright © 1996-2019 Stephen B Kinzler
inbrowse
Copyright © 1999-2019 Stephen B Kinzler
gowww
Copyright © 2000-2019 Stephen B Kinzler
These programs are free software; you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version.
These programs are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with these programs (see the file "COPYING"); if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
| Unix Home Dir |
http://kinzler.com/me/home.html Many scripts and config files for Unix/X11 environments |
| align | http://kinzler.com/me/align A text column alignment filter |
| vshnu | http://kinzler.com/me/vshnu A visual shell and CLI shell supplement |
| webrowse |
http://kinzler.com/me/webrowse Tools to interface web browsers to the Unix user CLI |
| xtitle |
http://kinzler.com/me/xtitle Set window title and icon name for an X11 terminal window |
| z | http://kinzler.com/me/z A convenience frontend for tar, gzip, zip, etc |
Steve Kinzler
<steve@kinzler.com>
http://kinzler.com/me
January 2019
