Elinks – Text browser with JavaScript

In the cases where only a terminal is available, and a web page needs to be tested, text browsers can be very helpful. However, most browsers are unable to support JavaScript, which is required for certain web pages to function properly.

One text based browser that does support JavaScript is elinks, specifically version 0.13 or higher. Unfortunately, most package managers only have elinks 0.12, which does not support JavaScript.

Since elinks is open source, the obvious solution is to compile it yourself.

Here are the steps to follow:

wget http://elinks.or.cz/download/elinks-current-0.13.tar.bz2
tar xjvf elinks-current-0.13.tar.bz2
cd elinks-0.13*
./configure

Check the output for ECMAScript support. If it is supported, you can proceed with the next steps.
If supported continue with

make
sudo make install

If ECMAScript support is not available, you will need to install the JavaScript developer package. The package name may vary depending on your operating system. For CentOS, it is called js-devel.

Once you have installed the necessary package, the last step is to validate the functionality of elinks with JavaScript.

elinks --version
ELinks 0.13.GIT
Built on May 22 2020 17:44:52

Features:
Standard, IPv6, UTF-8, Periodic Saving, Viewer (Search History, Timer,
Marks), Cascading Style Sheets, Protocol (Authentication, File, FTP,
HTTP, URI rewrite, User protocols), MIME (Option system, Mailcap,
Mimetypes files), LED indicators, Bookmarks, Cookies, ECMAScript
(SpiderMonkey), Form History, Global History, Scripting (Spidermonkey
ECMAScript), Goto URL History