[conspire] Free Opera Reg. Codes Today Only! Plus Usage Hints

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark S Bilk (mark at cosmicpenguin.com):

[w3m:]

> Wow, what a hack!  It does tables and graphics, very fast.
> 
> But how does it put up graphics in an xterm (or kde konsole)?

Frankly, it'd never before occurred to me to attempt to do that, before
you raised the question.  When I'm autoinvoking it from mutt, while
reading my mail, I want to specifically avoid pulling in hyperlinked
graphics from HTML-format mails.  

But, anyhow, it turns out that w3m has the built-in ability to invoke
"xv" to view images -- but can be made to use something else, e.g.,
/usr/bin/display, using an entry for MIME type "image/* in /etc/mailcap or
~/.mailcap, like so:

image/*; display %s

You can specify external viewers of other file types as well:

image/*;                     display %s
application/postscript;      ghostview %s
application/x-dvi;           xdvi %s


> It's a shame they came up with a UI different from that of both 
> netscape and lynx.

Well, I think the point was to do a fresh ASCII interpretation of tables
in a fashion better than what lynx did.  Basically, w3m is intended as
a fancy pager for HTML content.

> It's particularly silly to have the text
> you're typing into a form line show up at the bottom of the  
> window instead of the form.  

Eh, one gets used to that.  As the FAQ says:

Q: How do I fill in forms with w3m?
A: Form input fields are displayed in red (or reverse). Move the cursor
to them and hit RETURN. Then,

        * if it is a text input field, put in your text on the bottom
           line,
        * if it is a radiobutton or checkbox, that item is selected,
        * if it is a textarea, an editor is spawned,
        * if it is 'submit' or 'reset', well, just do it. 


> I'd rather wait 3 seconds for opera to come up from mutt than 
> learn w3m's UI.  Plus you get the text formatting with opera.

Different problem domains, different solutions:  Personally, I want to
be able to ssh from anywhere in the world, including over very slow
connections, to read my mail directly on my SMTP server.  Thus, I tend
to leave a few mutt sessions running under GNU screen on my SMTP host,
all the time, and ssh-connect to those GNU screen sessions from wherever
I am at the moment.  For that and other reasons, I like to keep my
mail-handling small, fast, and text-based, for the most part.

I also have a strong preference for open-source tools.

Mind you, the people at Opera Software ASA _do_ manage to produce a
really fine product.