Links is a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...

text Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...

and graphical

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

with a pull-down menu system. It renders complex pages, has partial

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...

4.0 support (including tables and frames and support for multiple character sets such as

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of e ...

), supports color and monochrome terminals, and allows horizontal scrolling. It is intended for users who want to retain many typical elements of graphical user interfaces (pop-up windows, menus etc.) in a text-only environment. The original version of Links was developed by Mikuláš Patočka in the

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. The ...

. His group ''Twibright Labs'' later developed version 2 of the Links browser, which displays graphics, and renders fonts in different sizes (with

spatial anti-aliasing In digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is a technique for minimizing the distortion artifacts ( aliasing) when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution. Anti-aliasing is used in digital photography, computer graphi ...

), but no longer supports

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

(it used to, up to version 2.1pre28). The resulting browser is very fast, but does not display many pages as intended. The graphical mode works even on

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

systems without the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

or any other window environment, using either

SVGAlib SVGAlib was an open-source low-level graphics library which ran on Linux and FreeBSD and allowed programs to change video mode and display full-screen graphics, without the use of a windowing system. Some popular games like '' Quake'' and ''D ...

or the

framebuffer A framebuffer (frame buffer, or sometimes framestore) is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Mode ...

of the system's

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer mo ...

Graphics stack

The graphics stack has several peculiarities for a web browser. The fonts displayed by links are not derived from the system, but compiled into binary as gray scale bitmaps using the

Portable Network Graphics Portable Network Graphics (PNG, officially pronounced , colloquially pronounced ) is a raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange ...

(PNG) format. This allows the browser to be one executable file independent of the system libraries. However, this increases the size of the executable to about 5 MB. The fonts are anti-aliased without hinting and for small line pitches, they employ an artificial sharpening to increase legibility. Sub-pixel sampling further increases legibility on LCD displays. This allowed links to have anti-aliased fonts when anti-aliased font libraries were uncommon. All graphic elements (images and text) are first converted from a given gamma space (according to known or assumed gamma information in PNG, JPEG etc.) through known user gamma setting into a 48 bits pixel photometrically linear space where they are re-sampled with bilinear re-sampling to the target size, possibly taking aspect ratio correction into account. Then the data are passed through a high-performance restartable dithering engine which is used regardless of monitor bit depth, i.e., also for 24 bits per pixel colour. This Floyd-Steinberg dithering engine considers the gamma characteristics of the monitor and uses 768 KiB of dithering tables to avoid time expensive calculations. A technique similar to

self-modifying code In computer science, self-modifying code (SMC) is code that alters its own instructions while it is executing – usually to reduce the instruction path length and improve performance or simply to reduce otherwise repetitively similar code, ...

function template Templates are a feature of the C++ programming language that allows functions and classes to operate with generic types. This allows a function or class to work on many different data types without being rewritten for each one. The C++ Standa ...

s, is used to maximise the speed of the dithering engine without using

assembly language In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as Assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence b ...

optimization. Images that are scaled down also use sub-pixel sampling on LCD to increase the level of detail. The reason for this high-quality processing is: to provide proper realistic up and downsampling of images, and photorealistic display regardless of the monitor gamma, without colour fringing caused by 8-Bit gamma correction built into the X server. It also increases the perceived colour depth by over 24 bits per pixel. Links has graphics drivers for the X Server, Linux framebuffer, svgalib, OS/2 PMShell and AtheOS GUI.

Forks

ELinks

''Experimental/Enhanced Links'' (ELinks) is a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

of Links led by Petr Baudis. It is based on Links 0.9. It has a more open development and incorporates patches from other Links versions (such as additional extension scripting in

Lua Lua or LUA may refer to: Science and technology * Lua (programming language) * Latvia University of Agriculture * Last universal ancestor, in evolution Ethnicity and language * Lua people, of Laos * Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...

) and from Internet users.

Hacked Links

''Hacked Links'' is another version of the Links browser which has merged some of Elinks' features into Links 2. Andrey Mirtchovski has ported it to

Plan 9 from Bell Labs Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has be ...

. It is considered a good browser on that operating system, though some users have complained about its inability to cut and paste with the Plan 9 snarf buffer. , the last release of Hacked Links is that of July 9, 2003, with some further changes unreleased.

Other

Links were also ported to run on the Sony PSP platform as PSPRadio by Rafael Cabezas with the last version (2.1pre23_PSP_r1261) released on February 6, 2007. The

BeOS BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users an ...

port was updated by François Revol who also added GUI support. It also runs on

Haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a '' kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a '' kigo'', or ...

References

External links

*
User documentation
for Links
Links-Hacked project

Links for OS X
on

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM– ...

and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

*
(forum)

Linkx forkOriginal Links Source Code
{{DEFAULTSORT:Links (Web Browser) 1999 software Free web browsers OS/2 web browsers MacOS web browsers POSIX web browsers SVGAlib programs Text-based web browsers Web browsers for Plan 9