w3m
 w3m running in an xterm displaying the Wikipedia main page. | |
| Developer(s) | Akinori Ito and team members |
|---|---|
| Stable release | |
| Repository | |
| Operating system | Unix |
| Type | Web browser |
| License | MIT license |
| Website | w3m.sourceforge.net |
w3m is a free software/open source text-based web browser. It has support for tables, frames, SSL connections, color and even inline images on suitable terminals. Generally, it renders pages in a form as true to their original layout as possible.
The name "w3m" stands for "WWW-wo miru", which is Japanese for "see the WWW".
In Emacs
w3m is also used by the Emacs text editor via the w3m.el Emacs Lisp module. This module gives fast browsing of web pages inside of Emacs. However, rendering of web pages isn't done in Emacs Lisp; only final display is handled in Emacs Lisp with the rendering done by the w3m application. So, unlike the slower Emacs/W3 which does both rendering and display computation entirely in Emacs Lisp, the operation of w3m.el is much faster than Emacs/W3.
Forks
There are two forks of w3m that add support for multiple character encodings and other features not in the original:
- Hironori Sakamoto’s w3m-m17n (“m17n” stands for “multilingualization”), and
- Kiyokazu Suto’s w3mmee (“mee” stands for "Multi-Encoding Extension").
