Re: Reviving the terminal internet — lo oking for collaborators

On 2026-08-03 00:56, Mayank Bhardwaj wrote:
> - text-first, zero-noise browsing fast startup, no tracking, no dark
> - patterns

A number of players (lynx, links, elinks, elinks2, w3m, etc) already
occupy this space, so you'd likely want to offer features those are
missing.

> - terminal-native feeds (RSS/Atom, maybe Mastodon)

There are a number of terminal-first tools to fill this niche, whether
things like rss2email (which I use) & newsboat/newsbeuter for RSS, or
toot(1) for Mastodon.  And most have a better interface than would
happen if you tried to wedge them into a CLI browser.

> - collaborative browsing sessions (think SSH for the web)

Perhaps you have such a need, but it's not a selling point for me.

> 1. What do you see as the biggest pain points / missing pieces in
> text-mode browsing today?

As others have noted, JavaScript is the biggest issue, followed
closely by web-devs' assumption that they get to control the browsing
experience, where I like how lynx, dillo, and friends let me customize
the experience for how *I* want it.  My key-bindings.  My font-choices.
My color-choices.

> 2. Is anyone interested in a more modern side-project in the same
> spirit (new engine, not a Lynx fork), or is that a fool's errand you'd
> advise against?

The W3C standards for the whole host of web technologies would take a
lifetime of developer-effort to implement.

So I'd try to set sites on a manageable goal or roadmap.

First get basic HTML rendering.

Allow it to refresh/resize dynamically (Lynx has some issues here since
IIUC it doesn't maintain the DOM, but rather renders it to a buffer, so
resizing requires reloading the page).

Deal with emoji/Unicode (lynx has gotten a lot better here over the
years).

Figure out how you want to deal with images in the terminal and do it
(links to images to launch in a local viewer?  Render them using sixel
graphics? Provide a low-res rendering using Unicode chars?).

Add some basic CSS support and/or allow for local custimization like
colors.  Dillo strikes a nice balance here, allowing you to choose from

  - best-effort using the remote CSS
  - best-effort using only inline CSS
  - override things with the user-stylesheet (I use this, and love that
  it renders sites in the same fonts/colors across the board)

If designed from the start with the intent of adding a JS
parser/execution engine, you might even be able to support some basic
JavaScript.

> I'm prepared to write code, not just ideas.

It might help to share which language you propose to implement this in,
whether C, C++, Golang, Rust, Python, Zig, or whatever.

-tim
--