cga2000 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote Mon, Jun 05, 2006: > On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 10:08:37AM EDT, Jonas Fonseca wrote: > > I'm not really convinced 256 colors was such a good idea to begin with. > Naturally, it's orders of magnitude better than the 8/8 or even 8/16 on > regular terms.. But why not go the whole hog and have a terminal that > supports what the video card is capable of? 16-bit - 64k colors would > probably have been a sensible choice and made life easier for everybody? > > Only one extra byte per cell..
Someone posted a patch for something like this, using the X libraries. It never was polished to a degree where it was worth merging, tho'. > > Ok, but if you feel like modding up your ELinks you should really try > > the Spidermonkey Javascript scripting backend created by Miciah. It's > > fairly easy to get working on a debian system > > Really? I was never able to get xterm, gnu/scren, and elinks.. to build > from source - the debian way, I mean.. I was in a rush and it seemed I > had to become a debian packaging expert before I could hope to get that > to work.. So now I have a bunch of stuff that's all /.configure'd and > compiled from source. Annoying. I can imagine. Only ever felt the need to compile school related stuff, elinks, git, (cogito), and xterm. The last one to get 256 colors, and I am still using the one I compiled on my previous debian system. > This said, I'm very curious of the Javascript capabilities and I would > really like to see the difference it makes. I do run into pages where I > am stuck and I have to fire up mozilla and I suspect that not having > Javascript enabled is part of my problem. Sorry, that I was not clear. I am talking about using JavaScript for browser scripting, not document scripting. That is, using JavaScript to define hooks that can handle stuff from the goto URL dialog or preformat the HTML source. > > Having a sane default configuration is very important. The many options > > is a weakness if you end up scaring new users away. If they feel they > > have to know of all the little details. > > That's pretty much what I meant. But as a new user I only noticed all > the options when I took a look at the elinks.conf file. But then I was > in so much of a rush that I did not really look at the o - "Option > Manager" until recently.. As a new user you hopefully will get a long way by only using the terminal option dialog (under Setup in the main menu). Once your screen/terminal is configured most things should just work. > Actually what I missed - again as a new user - was more samples of > elinks "in action".. I did find a few screenshots but I would have liked > to see more. I have some (mostly 256 related) at http://jonas.nitro.dk/screenshots/ > Now, the reason I say this is that for a new user and for > something such as elinks that has the potential to display such a wide > variety of documents.. I was never sure I was configured correctly and > seeing what you or the other seasoned users of elinks are seeing. This > nagging feeling that I may not be making the most of the product. > > For instance, until you told me this thing about setting my foreground > and background to "black" I was seeing lots of pages revert to my > xterm's black background. Now practically everything is rendered with a > white/light background.. I don't know if this makes sense.. But my point > is that being the only elinks user in my neighborhood .. as far as I > know .. it was not likely one of the seasoned users I mentioned would > have stopped by.. and said.. wait a minute.. this isn't right.. looked > at my setup and fixed a couple of things. And conversely I could not > walk up to someone's desk looked over his shoulder for a couple minutes > and said.. wait a minute.. his elinks looks a lot better than mine.. > iow, I was totally in the dark as to how an optimal setup of elinks > should behave in real-life situations. May still be, for that matter.. Screenshots sells, I agree. Although most apps are easily downloaded, configured and installed, the first appearance by which you make the decision whether to even bother with all that may often be a screenshot. And properly more so for something as seemingly "out-dated" as a text-mode browser. Anyway, I have the same feeling about Mutt. I feel I am only using a very small subset of its capabilities and that some of my usage patterns might be a bit broken, but it works for me, I have become comfortable with it, and that is really all that matters. Especially, since I don't want to spent a lot of time configuring and reading docs. > I don't know if it's realistic/possible but it might be a good idea to > have elinks "test pages" .. you go to the test page and if you're set up > right you should see this.. and a link to a screenshot. > > Confessions of the isolated noob.. not sure that's very useful. > > :-) It's certainly a new approach to a more visual tutorial and might suit ELinks better than the poor introduction we have now. On the other hand I wonder if most users of text-mode browser is this "visually oriented". But then again, Links2 has this calibration page to help you get the basics working and that is of course a great help. BTW, being new to ELinks, you should go over contrib/elinks.fortune, there's some good tips and tricks in it. > > > As far as user satisfaction > > > goes I would have given mozilla six out of ten.. At this point in time, > > > I would give elinks 7.5.. and apart from changing a few keyboard actions > > > I haven't really done anything to customize it. But it's nice to know > > > that just about anything I may need to customize *is* customizable. > > > > Now you are just being nice. ;) > > No, I'm dead serious: > > 1. I'm on a bb connection that performs quite well for stuff like iso > images downloads etc. Most pages in mozilla take some five to twenty > seconds to render.. Twenty seconds..! I mean that's pretty much a worse > case scenario but it adds up to ten minutes' wait doing nothing to > access a mere thirty web pages.. If like me you google a lot for tech > info and try a number of links before you find something that looks half > useful that's clearly unacceptable. I mostly use ELinks for this sort of thing: "dict this", "g that", because it is less frustrating. > 2. Now that I have aligned my basic navigation keyboard actions to vim's > - j,k to scroll .. h,l to go back and forward.. and J,K to jump to the > next/previous link I'm having the most comfortable surfing experience > ever.. And once I had figured how to use the "Keybinding Manager" it > only took a couple of intuitive minutes to set my bindings > *interactively*.. Try to do that in mozilla. I am still mousing my way through mozilla. Well, apart from when I start pounding the Tab key to get to some link. :-P And you really can't always depend on the Up/Down keys doing what you expect since the page layout may make pressing Down jump to the bottom of the page. > 3. Because elinks is a text-mode browser I don't have to put up with all > the distractions.. click here and there to block all this commercial > shockflash stuff .. with mozilla it usually takes a minute or more > before I have enough peace and quiet and then I am able to (re)focus and > actually start reading. With elinks, I can choose to display a picture > when I want/need it. Freedom, you know.. On the otherhand you don't get to experience the tasty new slashdot design. But using the URL passing mechanism you can easily fireup the firefox. > Come to think of it.. I got my math wrong.. if each of the above is > worth only one extra point I should have rated mozilla 4.5 and elinks > 7.5/10.. > > :-) Heh. Again thanks for the input. -- Jonas Fonseca _______________________________________________ elinks-users mailing list [email protected] http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/elinks-users
