ManMachine
@max@manmachine.me
Fixed a bug in the notification page that made snac hang forever while trying to read abnormally big files.
Improved support for text-only web browsers: it's now possible to configure a set of web browser user-agent strings that will receive simpler HTML in the private timeline web UI. Basically, it consists in avoiding details / summary HTML tags as much as possible.
Added some fixes to media proxy code.
Fixed EmojiReact code to allow any emoticon defined in emojis.json, not only those with colon-wrapped identifiers.
Fixed a bug in notification filtering (paging was sometimes incorrect).
Added a notification filter for Webmentions.
Mastodon API: Don't return reactions count as string (contributed by mkljczk), implemented GET /v1/media (contributed by clairemont).
Fixed bug in documentation examples (contributed by Sprite_tm).
Updated Ukrainian and Russian translations (contributed by wincentbalin and koru).
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.
RE: https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/117199373397721942
Have you ever drifted so hard you fork a JavaScript compiler and start writing your program in the compiler
@aud @SnoopJ @jonny The most wild one to me is that large parts of the frontend, including a lot of the e-book viewer, are written in a compile-to-JS language called RapydScript. Kovid wanted the syntax of RS to be more like Python, which the original dev of RS didn't want, so Kovid forked it and made RapydScript-NG.
All that would be bad enough, but so far as I'm aware, Calibre is the only project using RS-NG, so Kovid started adding random Calibre library functions to the RS-NG *compiler*.
Is this still working?
@justine U talkin’ 2 me?
p » 🌐
@p@hj.9fs.net
How many of my electronic music-making friends make their own synth patches/sounds? How many use/prefer presets? Or, really, what is your split, because I assume we all use both to varying degrees?
Vote and/or explain!
| Presets! I ain't reinventing shit: | 7 |
| Roll yr own synth sounds!: | 15 |
| Some of both! Obviously!: | 38 |
Closes in 2:00:55
probably never use a preset exactly as they come cause i like playing around, sometimes really start with a plain init patch but im also not that advanced that i am able to make patches as great as some factory ones e.g. on my minilogue XD - so it’s really a totally open way how i have it. purism for one or the other option is not my thing
@etherdiver I don't use synths that often but if my needs are simple I usually do them myself while if they're more complex I check the presets to see if I can find one to tweak.
Whatever I think gets me there faster.
@etherdiver i voted ‘roll my own’ even though i guess that’s a lie… but! i only really use presets on vintage stuff (/emulations) and specifically when i want it to be recognizable as a well-known preset or just sort of evoke the presets of the era while mentally kinda giving my respect to the folks who programmed them.
@etherdiver
My main focus is the 303, so I can choose between two presets: Sawtooth or Rectangle. That's it. 😅
I use other gear in my wide gigs and there I use mainly presets to get quick results and because my patch experiments mostly sound like shit. At one point I need to experiment more to prepare my own presets or better: Get the experience to come up with fitting patches on the fly. I'm not there yet.
@etherdiver I do a lot of musicking as a live coding jam, so part of the fun is starting with something simple, and making something more complex and then changing the sound throughout.
There are presets, but I need to remember them, I don't have them written down or ready to be copied from somewhere.
If I like a particular sound, I take a note and try to recreate it at a later point.
@etherdiver I have my own growing library of made sounds, but I do use a lot of presets from my synths. Some people know what they are doing and the sounds are great. So I mix and match.
@etherdiver I voted presets, because so far the ADHD hyperfocus has not included that part of making music 🙈
Things that suck about being human—the right kind of stretch one day that loosens up just the part that’s been bothering me and having a day or two relief.
Until a related part goes “ooooh that lack of pain is nice! I can move different now, Ahh that’s… ope. There it is now I hurt too”
LP still can't spell Ainmhícon [They 🔸 "He" is deprecated and will be removed in a future version] » 🌐
@LionsPhil@plush.city
@NanoRaptor so many things (stretches, naps, cardio, a hot drink) are "so is this going to make you complain more, or less, body?" "not telling :3 "
@NanoRaptor nothing worse than going in for a nice relaxing stretch only to pull the worst deepest muscle somehow and feel 900% worse for a bit.
@colinstu there’s that particular time of the morning I could stretch juuuust the right (wrong) way and boom - sudden thigh or calf or back cramp. WHY.
Fucking hell, modems are more annoying than I realised
I mean I guess I always knew that given how V.90 worked the entire thing had to be cursed but I was not anywhere near ready to learn *how* cursed
"Echo cancellation" they have played us for complete fools
It's fine Fabrice Bellard failed at this in 2000 how hard can it possibly be
@mjg59 I've been working with a SIMCOM LTE modem the last few months, and the whole thing seems decidedly *very* cursed.
@mjg59 Back in ancient times, around 1990 or so, I was helping to write the OS for a multiline FAX modem card. I wrote the modem chip drivers over two months as a summer job... it was all haunted algorithms, every single line of code.
The fun part about old computers and consoles is that they're still there, if not physically then via emulator, and you can just decide to program for them instead of something modern for no reason other than that it'd be a neat experience and you want to
And you can still make stuff people would want today
Why make something for DOS? Why make something using QBasic?
Why not? Why make something with Lua, or C#, or JavaScript, or Python? Why make something with Godot or Love2D or Raylib?
Creation is its own reward
Is it art to make something for old computers or with obsolete languages? I dunno I just think it's fun
@eniko - Why wouldn't it be?
I have a whole series of Game Boy games sketched out (in my head at the moment) that I feel would have as much artistic merit as something released for today's latest and greatest.
I wonder if people who adopted weird art styles did it to advance art or if they just thought it was neat
@eniko Everytime I check on interviews or articles about artists explaining why their art style looks like that, usually boils down to "I just liked how it looks lmao".
@eniko I know way more about music history than visual art history, but in music all the people trying to advance art are novelties who had basically no impact, and the people who made weird stuff that they thought was neat are the ones who have an impact on the form going forward. This is true pretty much as far into experimental music as you want to go, if someone is talking about pushing what music can be, rather than just making weird art they like they are a hack.
@eniko
From what I gather (recent trip to Musée d'Orsay) the Impressionists were mostly just trying something, but some Salon of recognised artists said they were Doing Art Wrong, so the impressionists said "Fuck You" and increased the amount of the thing they were doing.
@eniko I think this falls in the 'neat' category but I have difficulty following basic instructions. Draw knight with a sword, brain goes 'ok first lets throw literal paint all over the person, okay the paint was magical and the armour affected grew a tree from it'
@eniko *Me trying to push my limits rn with HolyC for no practical reason*
"It's called having fun Bill, take it or go to hell"
@eniko Yes! Art is about making people feel something. Choosing to use old technology changes the feel, and that makes it an artistic choice.
@eniko If you later need to get fancy, you can compile it or write extensions in C. Discipline > language features for partitioning / OOP. Why the hell not?
I'd give up 95% of graphics in most AAA games for just ONE genuinely funny plot line and a mechanic that is still fun mid-game.
Sorry, ranting. Anyway BASIC is fine. Unlike most programmers, when *I* say Python's just BASIC for millennials, it's not a slur. :)
@eniko I did some quite spiffy things (for about $6.50/hr contract, my first job!) in Microsoft Pro Basic + Borland C and a third party VGA library back in the dawn of time. It would have been easy with... searchable documentation.
[Ominous low tone]
Narrator: But, in those days, they did /not/ have searchable documentation....
@eniko I think it absolutely makes sense - like with visual art, the medium is part of the piece
and the constraints of the medium and whether working with it feels right or fun or exciting is part of the process - I don't think there needs to be a reason other: this is mine and I'll speak through this
@eniko @vampiress has created
https://funtimeelectrics.itch.io/second-hand-computer
Which lets you make text games!
@eniko I have been eyeing seeing how gnarly GameBoy Advance development is. I assume it's all sorts of gnarly, but maybe that means it's *fun,* too.
@valthonis oh GBA is actually fairly nice! It's a 32 bit system with a real multiply and divide which helps a ton, and you have your choice of using tiles and sprites or a couple of different types of framebuffer. Its actually pretty great
the Genesis holds a special place in my heart because i produced my own SDK for it, based off some 68000 C compiler from MIT for some UNIX port called TRIX... never seen TRIX, but oh boy i got that dang C compiler to spit out Genesis games to hell and back!! on the other hand, one can get really far with a C header full of fixed-address pointers and an arm-none-eabi GCC/Clang cross compiler... nowadays you can use Devkitpro (is that even still "recommended" anymore? probably not...) on the GBA and there's some other modern C toolchain for the Genesis that's waaaay more advanced than a header with a bunch of pointers defined in it
do it do ittttttt you musttt get into old console development
old game consoles were my gateway drug to all kiiinds of crazy projects down the line
@wec @valthonis oh wow i did bare metal programming for the m68k, can't imagine figuring all that out as a kid
@eniko the only downside would be when emulating it would take significantly more resources than a native approach on a modern machine, like some old systems that require beefy current-day hardware for something that was possible in a few tens of MHz originally (looking at you sega saturn)
@0 yeah but there's loads of emulators that ran on 10s of megahertz even back in the day too
@eniko yes very true. we're just salty that one of our favorite DOS point and click adventures is surprisingly difficult to get the settings right in dosbox, making the OPL emulation for sb16 stutter, and it's not supported in scummvm
Did you know that on Unix-like systems it is generally possible to search across man (manual) pages with a command apropos? E.g. apropos wifi on my freshly installed NetBSD finds me documentation for the available network drivers, and a very helpful page afterboot that explains, among other things, how to connect to WiFi (and then install software from binary packages).
| Yes: | 221 |
| TIL, thanks: | 307 |
Closed
I used Unix-like systems for a long time, but I only learned about apropos a couple of years ago. 😓 i should've had RTFM
@nina_kali_nina Ironically the best way to find out about the `apropos` tool would have been the `apropos` tool
(You can also access it with `man -k`)
@mcc it doesn't work (right) after midnight, right?
@nina_kali_nina @mcc oh that sounds awfully familiar… yeah, looks like they fixed that “bug” last year - https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030
@nina_kali_nina That was one of the very very few commands I knew when I started playing with Unix-like systems.
I think I also knew about ls, cd, cat, more, sed and man. Everything else I found from apropos searches. :)
@nina_kali_nina the manual used to be a lot smaller, you could read all of it, or of not all, a good chunk. I learnt of a lot of Unix back in the day by doing "ls /bin /usr/bin" and doing man thing on each one. That and some man 1 intro.
@drj yep. I've read all the man pages of ДЕМОС ( Soviet BSD derivative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOS ) back when I started my *nix journey. I wonder if it had apropos in it and I simply forgot about it, or it's a new thing
@nina_kali_nina my first Unix was SunOS 4.0/4.1 ish in 1992, and that had it. I always though it was "not very Unix" to have a whole command that was the same as man -k.
@drj I just checked the manual I've read, it explains apropos but it didn't left a lasting impression, unlike whatis and just the option of grepping through stuff
@nina_kali_nina I find it's WAY more useful (and simultaneously advertised) on BSDs -- OpenBSD is what initially taught me about it, in their similar first boot document.
Coherent and exhaustive documentation for the whole platform is one of the nice bits of the BSDs, too. Being able to find out how to configure my specific quirky video chipset on an old compaq laptop 100% from the man page, entirely offline, on OpenBSD was kind of a highlight of that experience, and apropos absolutely helped
@nina_kali_nina If you're truly lazy, you can use `man -k` instead of `apropos` to save one keystroke.
@miodvallat @nina_kali_nina or `whatis`, which should be the same as `man -k` but maybe easier to remember?
@miah it's not the same on my system; whatis only searches for man page names, not the content
@nina_kali_nina @miah @miodvallat
Yeah, different.
When I run "whatis whatis" I get one response. When I run "apropos whatis" I get a lot of responses, including "apropos", "whatis", "man", "makemandb", and others
@nina_kali_nina It's funny, I knew it was a command but I never actually got around to learning what it does!
@nina_kali_nina to be fair, so many linux distros avoid installing many of the manual pages by default unlike most *BSD base install sets. Documentation should always be included by default not the other way around.
@cararemixed this!!
@nina_kali_nina @cararemixed There is that. See also my parallel rant on the commercial unixes (some of whom only shipped online manuals (as electronic manuals on the system were called) as a paid extra).
There is also the fact that GNU, which supplies most of the basic Linux userland utilities, are ideologically opposed to man pages.
@nina_kali_nina the issue i had was simply discoverability
yeah there might be detailed documentation on how to do things, but if you can't find it it's almost useless
@nina_kali_nina that saved my ass so many times, both personally and professionally. One of the most useful tools together with the more recent tldr
@nina_kali_nina 🤓☝️ Apropos as a command stems from the Lisp lineage (iirc Interlisp being the first to have it) all the way back in the 1970s.
@nina_kali_nina
One could RTFM until the heat-death of the universe and still not have learned everything about Unix
@nina_kali_nina @DelilahTech “man -k” (keyword) is a synonym, which I find easier to type and remember.
@nina_kali_nina it was actually how i learnt the word "apropos"; well, yknow, coming across the command and then looking it up in a dictionary.
Oh no, wait, now i am telling you this story, i think it actually might be from "M-x apropos" from micro-emacs, a lightweight emacs-like that i used on the Atari ST.
@nina_kali_nina I'm lazy though and learned early on that man -k does essentially the same thing. So when man foo fails I just run it again with -k
@nina_kali_nina I know it in theory, but every time I actually need it, I have forgotten what the command is 
@jana wonderful people on the fedi say that man man nowadays mentions it, and it sure does on my system
@nina_kali_nina Also:
man info
info man
man bash
@rojun no bashing allowed around here 👋
(people at my previous job called me a "bash witch" sometimes, it's really weird not to have it installed, but here we are)
@nina_kali_nina Yes! I have also since learned that some Linux distros don’t install all the man pages for the software they install (or distribute them as separate packages - this is often the case with Perl). Apropos can’t help you if the man pages are missing! 😠
@nina_kali_nina When I bought the CDs for Slackware Linux, like thirty-something years ago, they came with a massive manual. A physical book I mean. I'm quite sure it mentioned also apropos.
Today what's like, launch a do-it-all web installer and wait to set -maybe- the root password?
Then google for instructions about anything? So to have some cut and paste actions, and finally get lost in some overly complex web development environment.
@nina_kali_nina I assumed this was just as basic info as "man (command)" will show how the said command works.
And since man is often basically just the barebones list of parameters and brief examples, "info (command)" gives you a lot longer explanation.
@nina_kali_nina yeah, but I just use `man -k`, it's stupid to learn and type a new name for the same command
@nina_kali_nina this is cool, thanks for sharing!
FWIW, I have a hard time spelling "apropos", so I also just learned that man -k does the same thing (at least on macOS). For example, man -k wifi gives the same result as apropos wifi.
AND the argument can be a regular expression! The example in the manual is
$ man -k '\<copy\>.*archive'
Thanks for making me aware of this! Very useful!
So I’ve a bunch of SoundTouch stuff and it’s no longer made or supported by Bose (you can get it working with 3rd party software).
It’s crazy for how much the no longer made hardware is going these days.
This thing here is cool because you can AirPlay 2 to it but you can also input audio (e.g. from a record player) and stream it throughout the house.
Akko has developed the film from the camera that I accidentally soaked in Coke Zero. The closer to the spill the more damage to the film, with the last 10 or so photos completely lost. Those that survived look like mood.
@nina_kali_nina still, interesting...
Personally, I looked into the "Coffee Processing Method" several years back…
When I first started out, I was warned that the next generation would be a huge threat to our jobs as they would be "digital natives". In reality, I now have to manage a bunch of kids who seem to have never used a mouse before and complain that Excel doesn't work on their phone
⁶🤷♀️⁷
There's a certain power in knowing that very soon after I finish this final Limnetic Villains album, I will eventually cease being 'Limnetic Villains', and the whole project will be done and complete, and you won't know what happened to me, because I won't be posting again under this guise.
I'm deeply disappointed by the result of the #Debian #AI vote. I seems to me that the project is pretty much split down the middle on the issue, and I'm very unhappy that my ethical opposition puts me in the minority.
I'm not sure where we go from here, but I don't think I want to abandon ship after so many years in the project.
@demoographics perhaps the project forks into Debain and Debn
@simontatham I had to laugh, even though I'm pretty mad, so well played @demoographics
@bremner @demoographics it could be worse. Imagine if the LLVM project had had a schism of this type. One side would have had to rename itself "V".
never stop learning, TIL about `chflags nouchg`
p » 🌐
@p@hj.9fs.net
#neverslop #ai #antislop #kitto #comic #fediart #mastoart #art #noai #killcomputers
@p would it be ok when i materialize some of those anti-slop kitto coupons as stickers as a free give-away and hand out for events?
If you hire a poet, don't pay them by the line
It creates per verse incentives
🥁
@csilverman @DrOinOR I always love your work. How many of these Notes illustrations have you done?
i think qbasic is like the #1 thing that i care deeply about that almost nobody who follows me cares about lol XD
@eniko I do! I mean I never used the thing and never will, but your insights about it are very interesting and possibly even useful!
@eniko I don't think I ever used QBasic, but I did use its predecessor GW-Basic at high school.
For basics I was into Amos on the Amiga. Now that was a fun language. :)
@eniko I started with qbasic, it was a lot of fun making games and music in.
@eniko I learned how to program in QuickBASIC in high school, so it holds quite a bit of nostalgia for me. (And later Turbo Pascal!)
@eniko why do you love it
@gildilinie nostalgia, its where i first learned to code and make games. but it's also really thoughtfully designed in some ways, in that it doesn't have a concept of null and does automatic garbage collection even though it ran on ancient computers
@eniko ill talk up qbasic to anyone i can trick into listening
@rainbowcemetery i'm happy you saw this post :D
@eniko That I don’t care about it (either or) I think is the charm of it. The silliness of it is very human, and I like human.
@eniko *Me with FreeBASIC in my pocket*
@NullTheFool @eniko I have MMBasic on my Picocalc, but one of these days I'd like to write my own calculator software for it. As much as I love BASIC, if I'm going to write programs on a tiny keyboard with my thumbs, I want something a little more terse... preferably with good tab completion, too...
@eniko QBasic was my introduction to programming and I made a stick figure fighting game and I was THRILLED when I got an animation to work where you could punch a hole in our opponent and then the “camera” would show you stick figure through the hole.
I was a teenager and very much inspired by Mortal Kombat!
Anyone here have strong opinions on drawing tablets? I'm hearing so far that Huion has overtaken Waycom in the past few years.
I'm considering getting one mostly for work usage which likely will involve annotating images, cad drawings, documents, or other graphical representations with notes. I love hand drawn notes for explaining things to others and think a drawing tablet could simplify a few workflows compared to needing to print out artifacts to break out the pens and markers. (That and perhaps things will look better than the MS paint level mouse drawn annotations)
@fundamental I've used Wacom and Huion, as well as cheap no-name things, for drawing for a long time. I honestly can't tell the difference between the tablet part of the tablet between Wacoms and Huions. Perhaps people who are super advanced can tell the difference 🤔 in terms of resolution, precision, ease of use and such, both are quite similar in my experience. This applies only to models without built in displays that have a battery-free stylus.
If you're looking for something with a display, though, that's probably different and worth extra research. I only have a Huion display tablet, and its screen is pretty bad (though it's almost ten years old).
P.S. I have two Huions and one Wacom because Huions are cheaper
P.P.S. I have multiple tablets because reasons
@nina_kali_nina I'm leaning towards the displayless options in part because it feels like there's less to go wrong and as long as I can vaguely see where the cursor is going to be I don't think I'm going to be doing anything that would require the visual alignment a display would offer.
Overall I'm pleasantly surprised at the prices I saw compared to how inflation has hit other types of tech.
@fundamental displayless option is better for ergonomics, too. Some joke that the screen ones have only two configurations: "neck pain" and "shoulder pain". But it still feels much more natural to use, what a conundrum
new blog post: Linux https://kiwa.space/mew/linux.html
@kiwa feel you, the wind immediately went out of my sails of giving a shit about Linux as soon as Torvalds went on his pro-LLM bullshit complaining about social justice. It's still a thing I use out of inertia/lack of better options and I may be excited for Debian specifically if they actually pass the resolution banning it in the project itself but... who gives a shit if your kernel is proprietary or not if it's all corporate backed slop either way
I am experimenting with NetBSD for a slopless experience but that's not a recommendation or me pushing it, it reminds me heavily of Arch Linux in 2008 to configure, and the driver situation is bad enough I can only see using it on my headless home server.
Does your home page work in Dillo, Links, Netsurf? Does your favourite website? Your favourite forum? Why not?
@nina_kali_nina all sites I use do.
@nina_kali_nina Just checked that mine works in w3m and elinks. The only significant space for improvement is distinguishing the social media links from each other, I think
@h0m54r nice! <3
@nina_kali_nina Hmm, adding a <title> element to an inline SVG doesn’t make the text show up in w3m. Something to look at after some sleep I think.
Edit: No sleep needed, just <alt> tags in addition to <title> tags. (Bonus: I now better understand the difference between those attributes!)
@nina_kali_nina Yep. No Javascript, simple, non-essential CSS, and the personal markup language I write in requires alt text for all images.
@nina_kali_nina Probably not... then again, I haven't tried it. The HTML is proper semantic stuff so it wouldn't be completely catastrophic...
@nina_kali_nina My homepage and the omnibus? Yes. I'm not sure I have a favorite website. :thinking:
@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt Netsurf and elinks handle my favorite forum pretty well! Interestingly, elinks is better at interpreting the CSS, but the result is less readable than it would be if it didn't. Dillo simply doesn't load a wide range of sites and shows no error message. slashdot.org, motherfuckingwebsite.com, and example.org as examples. Not sure why.
@nina_kali_nina because some adtech devs at the orange site told me that conversion is all that matters, and I should stop being a luddite and ship a 20+mb of LLM-generated JS PWA and a separate iOS app.
@nina_kali_nina The https://drahflow.name/pipe-organ.htm subpage doesn't render the 3D model in links, and only non-interactively in w3m, but clicking the part links works even better than I expected (FreeCAD auto-launched to show them). 🤷
@nina_kali_nina I use KaTeX, a JavaScript package, to render LaTeX on my site. I feel that it fails gracefully; browsers that don't run client-side scripts just display the raw markup.
I have a hunch that the intersection of folks who use browsers without JavaScript and folks who can comfortably read LaTeX markup is fairly broad.
@nina_kali_nina funnily, Dillo homepage doesn't work as expected in Dillo itself (content is not centered), so I have an incentive to implement support for "margin: 0 auto".
@nina_kali_nina almost. cover images don't work, i imagine because I only have them in webp or something
@nina_kali_nina My Migraine Log app exports HTML. I've tested them in dillo and netsurf. They work, but with degraded interactivity (interactivity is implemented without JS, so needs some recent-ish CSS selectors).
@nina_kali_nina My homepage works in anything with modern TLS support, and that's only because Netlify are highly opinionated on that front... One day I'll put it back on my own infrastructure and let you read pages with telnet if you want.
The stuff I code, yes. I use lynx a fair amount and if it works there, should be fine in a fancier browser like links or Dillo. I haven't used either of those in some years
My site:
✅ dillo
✅ lynx
✅ Netsurf
Favorite website(s), forum(s), and Mastodon instances?
❌ dillo
❌ lynx
❓ Netsurf
Why not? those sites don't care 😞
@gumnos I sometimes use my fedi with an alternative front-end that works without JavaScript, it can be very fun to try!
@nina_kali_nina For the most part, I usually just have my two accounts up in Firefox in independent container-tabs, but could be persuaded to use something stand-alone if it were notably lighter while providing a similar experience (mostly the display of images)
@gumnos Fair enough! My self-hosted Brutaldon used to be generally almost as usable as the default web interface, just much faster. That was a long time ago, so I don't know if it's still an okay solution.
@nina_kali_nina I've been sorely tempted to set up illuminant on my VPS so that I can browse the fediverse with an NNTP client 😆
I don't use it as much as I should, but I absolutely appreciate the fact that it's there.
Most of the time when I want an alternative, I reach for w3m or chawan (terminal browsers)
@nina_kali_nina my blog at https://thomaspurnell.com is mostly just notes for myself and it annoyed me that it wasn't accessible from my amiga, so i recently made some changes to the point where it's usable (though far from perfect)
@nina_kali_nina I could quickly install Links and Netsurf. Both work okayish.
When I set up my photo gallery https://matdroste.de I made sure to make the Hugo template NoScript-compatible, so Netsurf works just with an uglier layout, no slideshow, and for some reason no socials.
With Links the only bugs are double entries in the top menu and no socials, but viewing galleries by downloading single JPGs would be frustrating.
@IvanDerSchreckhafte nice, good job! By the by, links has a graphical mode (-g flag) that is really neat
I installed links2 and it says "IFrame" where the navigation is, and it can be clicked on to view it, so yes, my website works in links2.
@nina_kali_nina oh humm... looks like animated webp support a no for Netsurf, elinks2 -g, and the most recent Dillo release. YouTube embeds predictably also non-functional.
@gamedevjeff Netsurf uses Google Webp library for webp support, it seems; IIRC Netsurf already supports animated GIF, so if should not be impossible to extend the webp support to animations
@nina_kali_nina yep! looks like low hanging fruit for someone keen. I looked at the webp library package source in Debian and saw the support for it, and even noticed the example code in the libwebp demux header.
@nina_kali_nina heck, I had to repeatedly complain to my bank so they'd fix their website to work with friggin firefox.
@nina_kali_nina my home page, yes, because I wrote it in HTML by hand in 1996 and haven't really updated it in the past decade or so.
@nina_kali_nina I recently made a website again and thought I'd try it in links, but that was not installed (and it's not my system so not up to me to decide whether it should be). So then I tried lynx, and concluded that it works, suboptimally, but it does.
And the other two made me think that I don't know if I even have a favourite website or a forum now :/
Does your home page work in Dillo, Links, Netsurf?Even more: #snac, an ActivityPub server I develop, works totally well with these browsers.
p » 🌐
@p@hj.9fs.net
@grunfink @nina_kali_nina Fedi servers don’t interact with browsers, only webclients do
@nina_kali_nina yes, and over gopher
gopher://m0yng.uk and http://m0yng.uk if anyone wants to try
@nina_kali_nina I have no idea but since I wrote it in Netscape I'd imagine it would work fine! https://lydie.cc
Small browser awareness thread. Mark the ones you know~
Am I missing some cool browsers that aren't super ancient? Feel free to comment as long as the browser is open source and is not a derivative of WebKit (or Blink or Chromium), Gecko (Pale Moon, K-Meleon, and so on) or Ladybird (yikes).
| Arachne: | 143 |
| Dillo (+forks): | 552 |
| Eww: | 161 |
| Links (+forks): | 715 |
| Lynx (+forks): | 991 |
| MicroWeb: | 18 |
| Mothra: | 108 |
| Netsurf: | 386 |
| Servo: | 668 |
| w3m: | 614 |
Closed
@nina_kali_nina I miss pre-12.16 Opera. Not sure if you count that as super-ancient or not, but it was my daily driver for probably over a year past its discontinuation
@h0m54r I used Opera as my main browser between versions 8 and 12. But it's not open source, right?
@nina_kali_nina Sadly not; another victim of proprietary software being discontinued and the source as good as thrown away.
@nina_kali_nina Kristall, which will browse http(s), gopher, gemini, and finger ( https://github.com/ikskuh/kristall )
I voted for several, but there's only one I use regularly. I even have it installed on my Android phone. Yes, lynx works just fine in Termux and I have set the URL handler there to launch it
@elithebearded I'm curious to hear why lynx and not other text mode browsers!
Habit, mostly. I started using lynx a long time ago I have bookmarks older than Google.
I rely on "lynx -dump" for HTML to plain text processing of email. Not sure if or how other tools would fill that
@elithebearded gotcha, fair points! I personally got used to links with the graphics mode, it was the fastest graphical browser I had during my uni years, and I really needed one
Lynx is absolutely awful at tables. The rendering is okay for the era when people mostly used tables for layout instead of CSS, but is not good for actual tabular data display, which is how people use tables today. I would be reluctant to recommend it to new users.
But in "advanced" mode, with vi bindings, and numbered links, I know the interface and that counts for a lot. I also know various command line options of lynx
@nina_kali_nina
Amfora is really good! It only supports Gemini protocol instead of HTML, so way more niche than other browsers: https://github.com/makew0rld/amfora
Amfora and Lagrange are my preferred geminispace browsers. Lagrange can be found here: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
@Dio9sys those are lovely! I guess I should have mentioned that I was looking for web browser recommendations, but I guess it's all browsers now ;p
@nina_kali_nina given the poll is over, what are your takeaways?
@fullywoolly I should take a closer look at chawan and SeaMonkey! For now, my go to browsers are still:
Most of those are just personal preferences
@nina_kali_nina I really need to make the switch to LibreWolf. I was on the fence on which fork to use.
I haven't used a console based browser in several decades ... I should try one again for funsies.
@nina_kali_nina I checked off the ones I used more than once, so mainly links, lynx, netsurf, and dillo. I'd consider the Goanna engined browsers like the Palemoon derivatives and K-Meleon to be pretty small/alt browsers as well.
Maybe:
* WebPositive (Haiku)
* Minuet (DOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Internet_Users_Essential_Tool
@alexshendi the first one is WebKit and the second one is not open sourced, if I'm not mistaken? But great ones, yes
@nina_kali_nina I used to work on #elinks when I was a student at University, twenty five years ago.
It was a lovely browser. Still is, as I believe it's still being developed.
Blast from the past!
@nina_kali_nina for years on my Atari I used CAB - https://atari.clauss-net.de/cab.html
@Bredroll oh, I know this one! It's sadly proprietary, but I am happy to see it mentioned nevertheless
still there for a long time as iCab. Same developer as Cab. But no open source
@nina_kali_nina wow, there are many more browsers (that I don't know) than I expected!
I like the Dillo UI. It’s just sad that most distributions ship it without TLS support.
@nina_kali_nina I remember using Amaya as a browser for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_%28web_editor%29
@nina_kali_nina Elinks forever in my heart, I will never forget the glory of tabbed browsing from the linux console, with images loaded straight to the framebuffer, and scripts to scrape video links and pass them to mplayer with fbdev
@nina_kali_nina Last I tried, the closest I got was w3m and elinks for the text based ones you mentioned. I basically just wanted images that scaled to fit the actual elements on the page in elinks as opposed to being something you clicked and it maybe displayed that separately. Browsh does what I'd want, but Browsh is also cheating by piggybacking off Firefox.
Servo is pretty dope in general, I'm hoping to use them for everything that currently works and just swap to Firefox derivatives for the stuff that doesn't.
@disorderlyf last time I tried, Servo was capable of handling most of the websites I visit regularly. But stability still needs to be improved.
@nina_kali_nina
Definitely going to look some of those up, now!
@nina_kali_nina
FWIW, I did look them up...
Text mode/terminal: Links, Lynx, W3m (W3m is my go-to for this).
Emacs: Eww.
DOS/FreeDOS: Arachne, MicroWeb.
Plan 9: Mothra.
Lightweight on Linux: Dillo, Netsurf.
Rust embedded: Servo.
@TerryHancock Dillo and Netsurf work on most modern operating systems, and Servo isn't embedded 🙂↕️
@nina_kali_nina
Is arachne fully open source these days? When I was using it, the situation was complicated.
@nina_kali_nina I would have liked to mention Konqueror, but that's also just Chromium (QtWebEngine) these days :(
@nina_kali_nina I use links somewhat frequently. Back around 2001 I'd use lynx on the real actual Linux console (SVGAtextmode for the win) and if I wanted to view a picture I could keyboard over to it and open it in zgv. Worked an absolute treat.
Lynx was also my very first Usenet client before I switched to slrn.
@nina_kali_nina Mothra is peak web browsing. Didn't know microweb, looks cozy.
Offpunk is missing in the list!
https://offpunk.net/
@nina_kali_nina Lynx is awesome but I like the cursor freedom and simplicity of w3m.
Lynx does have an absurdly good 3DS port, though.
@nina_kali_nina wow, I feel proud of myself for getting a "seven out of ten"!
But I didn't know links and lynx were different things 😅 (although I *did* wonder why 'links2' was spelt with an 'i' rather than a 'y'...)
The question: Does the browsrr do Javascript?
@SpaceLifeForm Servo does. But there are lots of websites that don't need any
True. But not likely to function if the site starts using Cloudflare.
@SpaceLifeForm makes me think how much Cloudflare cares about the DOM, and whether it is possible to add quirks to Netsurf to make it work
@angel this one is WebKit based IIRC. Wikipedia says it is Gecko based, but I think that might be either a mistake or related to a separate branch of it. It used to be very snappy!
@nina_kali_nina I was mildly interested in Ladybird until I saw it was all vibe-coded, which makes statements like this a bit baffling:
they will no longer accept public pull requests nor allow any other channels for submitting patches from non-maintainers, citing concerns about lower-quality contributions
Contrast with this statement from Servo:
Contributions must not include content generated by large language models or other probabilistic tools
@adamhotep I suppose projects are generally free to do whatever they want, but I agree that this completely kills my interest in it
@wyatt @adamhotep it also depends on python and uv, both of which are tainted at the very least. Makes me very sad.
@nina_kali_nina My single concern about alternative browsers is adblocking. That's a hard must-have for pages to load faster than 1200 bps.
@drwho out of the browsers mentioned, Netsurf has support for some basic AdBlocking. I guess it is less of a concern when there's no JavaScript, but there are still some ads here and there
@nina_kali_nina It's been my experience that blocking JS alone is insufficient. The images and "load this dynamically generated CSS file for tracking" also need blocked.
@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt I could swear my site used to display well in Links, but it seems to just displays asterisks for the buttons now... and I specifically made that section a <ul> for semantic reasons
@wyatt more than Mozilla in 2026?
@wyatt yeah, fair enough... I guess Pale Moon might be still similarly flexible and without Rust. I wonder if Servo aspires to be what Firefox is
@wyatt TT thanks...
@ltning you're the first! It's a great browser, probably the most advanced on my 286
@ltning I can dig through the bat scripts on the host; the network card and the packet driver both work fairly reliable
@nina_kali_nina Midori is missing, but unfortunately, it isn't maintained anymore, like some (most? all?) on that list. Because modern web is over-complicated shit!
WorldWideWeb
Line Mode Browser
NCSA mosaic
cello
viola
opera
vivaldi
seamonkey
flock
Falkon
Qutebrowser
gnome web
Nyxt
Konqueror
Otter
tkWWW
browsh
@nina_kali_nina Does LiteHTML count as one?
I only know it because it’s one of the way to display HTML mails in Claws Mail, beside Dillo.
@nina_kali_nina I'm making one! it's called weaver. I want it to eventually run on a microcontroller (with say 8-16 MB RAM), because I want more little gadgets that aren't phones that can browse the web
@kaimac good luck, this is a great goal! I'd say you might be able to achieve lots with that amount of RAM, because Netsurf can work with that much, and MicroWeb manages to be useful with 640K or less