w3m is a text-based web browser as well as a pager like ‘more’ or ‘less’. w3m is an abbreviation of “WWW-wo-Miru”, which is Japanese for “See the WWW”.
With w3m you can browse web pages through a terminal emulator window (xterm, rxvt or something like that). Further, w3m can be used as a text formatting tool which typesets HTML into plain text.
It is able to process HTML tables and frames but it ignores JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets.
Key Features
- Supports tables.
- Renders frames by converting frames into tables.
- Supports colors.
- Organizes its content in buffers or tabs, allowing easy navigation between them.
- With the w3m-img extension installed, w3m can display inline graphics in web pages.
- Where w3m’s HTML rendering capabilities do not meet requirements, the target URL can be handed over to a graphical browser with a single command.
- Cookies.
- Authentication.
- SSL verify
- IPV6 FQDN resolv.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, SunOS, HP-UX, and EWS4800.
Website: sourceforge.net/projects/w3m
Support: Manual, FAQ
Developer: Akinori Ito and contributors
License: MIT License

w3m is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Console Web Browsers | |
|---|---|
| eww | Emacs Web Wowser. It's integrated into Emacs, the famous text editor |
| Lynx | Legendary web browser that's still maintained |
| ELinks | Advanced and well-established feature-rich browser. Extend with Lua or Guile |
| w3m | Browser and terminal pager |
| Links | Text and graphic web browser with pull-down menu system |
| Offpunk | Offline-first command-line browser |
| Chawan | TUI web (and (S)FTP, Gopher, Gemini, ...) browser with CSS |
| Carboxyl | Chromium-based browser rendering modern websites directly in a console |
| edbrowse | Text editor, web browser and email client inspired by ed |
| Brow6el | Terminal web browser with graphics support |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
Explore our carefully curated directory of recommended free and open source software, covering every major software category.The directory forms part of our extensive collection of articles for Linux enthusiasts. It includes hundreds of detailed reviews, together with free and open source alternatives to proprietary software from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. LinuxLinks also covers interesting projects worth exploring, Linux-compatible hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful free and open source Linux application that we haven’t covered? Tell us about it using our submission form. |


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