| ELinks | |
|---|---|
 An older version of this article rendered in ELinks | |
| Original authors | Petr Baudiš, Jonas Fonseca |
| Developer | Witold Filipczyk |
| Initial release | March 2, 2002 (2002-03-02) |
| Stable release | |
| Preview release | 0.19.0rc1
/ December 6, 2025 (2025-12-06) |
| Written in | C, C++ |
| Operating system | DOS, Linux, Windows |
| Available in | English, Polish, Danish, French, Serbian, Hungarian, Czech, German, |
| Type | Text-based web browser |
| License | GPL 2.0 only |
| Website | github |
| Repository | github |
ELinks is a text-based web browser for the operating systems DOS, Linux, and Windows. It is free and open-source software with a GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0 only.
History
It began in late 2001 as an experimental fork by Petr Baudiš of the Links Web browser, hence the E in the name.2 Since then, the E has come to stand for Enhanced or Extended.3 On 1 September 2004, Baudiš handed maintainership of the project over to Danish developer Jonas Fonseca, citing a lack of time and interest and a desire to spend more time coding rather than reviewing and organising releases.4
On 17 March 2017, OpenBSD removed ELinks from its ports tree, citing concerns with security issues and lack of responsiveness from the developers.5
On 17 November 2017, ELinks was forked into another program named felinks, meaning forked elinks. On 1 December 2020, the felinks repository on GitHub was renamed to elinks, with permission from Baudiš, as the old ELinks was not being actively maintained.6
elinks is being actively maintained: preview version 0.18.0rc1 was released 7 December 2024,7 while stable version 0.18.0 was released 25 December 2024.8
Features
- HTTP and Proxy authentication
- Persistent HTTP cookies
- Support for browser scripting in Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua and GNU Guile9
- Tabs (though still text mode)9
- HTML tables and HTML frames9
- Background download with queueing
- Some support for Cascading Style Sheets9
- Some support for ECMAScript by using Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine9
- Editing of text boxes in external text editor
- Mouse support, with wheel scroll
- Colour text display
- Protocols supported:
- local files, Finger, Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP, Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), File Service Protocol (FSP), Server Message Block (SMB), Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)
- experimental: BitTorrent, gopher, gemini,4 nntp
References
References
- rkd77. "Release v0.19.1 · rkd77/elinks". Retrieved 1 March 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - Baudiš, Petr (2001-10-28). "[Announce] Experimental Links Tree". Gmane. Archived from the original on 2009-02-27. Retrieved 2008-10-28.
- "The history and evolution of the Links browsers". ELinks. Archived from the original on 2011-07-18. Retrieved 2010-12-14.
- Fonseca, Jonas (2004-12-24). "[elinks-users] [Announce] ELinks-0.10.0 (Thelma)". Linux From Scratch. Archived from the original on 2019-02-24. Retrieved 2019-02-24.
- Barrett, Edd (2017-03-17). "Remove www/elinks from the ports tree". MARC. Archived from the original on 2021-10-22. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
- Filipczyk, Witold (2017-11-11). "rkd77/elinks: Fork of elinks". GitHub. Archived from the original on 2020-12-13. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
- Filipczyk, Witold (2024-12-07). "Release v0.18.0rc1 · rkd77/elinks". GitHub. Archived from the original on 2025-02-20. Retrieved 2025-03-02.
- Filipczyk, Witold (2024-12-26). "Release v0.18.0: rkd77/elinks". GitHub. Archived from the original on 2025-02-11. Retrieved 2025-03-02.
- Bolso, Erik Inge (2005-03-08). "2005 Text Mode Browser Roundup". Linux Journal. Archived from the original on 2017-12-14. Retrieved 2010-08-05.