It should be no secret that I do not like modern web browsers, In fact I think the modern Internet as a whole is simply horrid. While in my younger years I derided smartphone apps that were simply frontend to services that I could access from my web browser, in my later years I have ironically come to prefer doing so from my personal computer.

While throwing out the web browser isn't practical for absolutely everything, you might be quite surprised to learn all the things you can dostraight from the command line.

This article contains a few recommendations on what software you could use to partially replace your bloated, nasty web browser.

E-mail clients

E-mail has always been fairly trivial to set up outside of a web browser. Netscape Navigator and the Mozilla suite used to have their own built-in e-mail client until Mozilla was split into Firefox and Thunderbird around 2003-2004.

mutt is a commonly used command line e-mail client and it's the one that I personally use. It's simple, elegant, and well tested. There's also neomutt that includes extra features, but those often make it into base mutt eventually.

Choose...

• mutt if you just want an e-mail client
• neomutt if you want the latest features earlier than upstream

Alternatives include...

• alpine
• notmuch

RSS Feed Readers

So many websites, and even social media feeds generate an RSS feed for your convenience. RSS allows you to easily follow several news feeds in a single centralized application.

For this, I use Newsraft, a minimalist RSS reader that I can give a list of feeds each with a custom, descriptive label. It gives me the ability to easily follow all my news feeds, and even YouTubers from one place without having to visit their respective websites.

I used to use a similar piece of software called newsboat, which is a bit more feature packed, but I couldn't control how it presented my feeds as well as I could with newsraft

I may discuss how to follow YouTube or social media feeds via RSS at a later date, but just know that an RSS reader can centralize the following and more...

• News Feeds
• YouTube Subscriptions
• Social Media Feeds
• Blogs
• Literally anything else with an RSS feed

But keep in mind if it doesn't have an RSS feed, it can't be read with an RSS reader.

Alternative options include...

• newsboat
• nom

Reddit

If you browse Reddit a lot, you can use a program called tuir to view or even participate in your favorite subreddits. It can navigate to any part of Reddit that you can with a web browser, and it's currently not affected by the site's API pricing policies.

Though it doesn't have 100% of it's functionality. For example, images and galleries require either a web browser or some sort of script to handle properly. But generally, lurking, posting, conversing, up/down voting, etc. should work fine. But since I'm not an actual participant of Reddit, I can't confirm this myself.

Alternatively, you can tack .rss to the end of any subreddit's URL and read it with your favorite RSS reader, but you will miss quite a bit of functionality if you decide to go down that route. But it's great if you don't want to engage with the comments sections.

YouTube

YouTube has been one of the most ornery and resistant websites to literally anything that isn't their "true intended experience". Especially if it may possibly prevent the viewer from having to see ads.

Invidious was once a good privacy focused frontend for use in web browsers, but has since become janky and unreliable. Making it more of a nuisance than a viable option.

However, options like pipe-viewer remain viable for searching for YouTube videos. It can even play them if you have either the mpv or vlc media players installed.

Of course, if you have mpv, you can also just feed it the URL like this:

$ mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Following YouTube channels is also another good use for an RSS reader. However, you may need to find a way to get the feed URL from a YouTube channel. You can visit fetchrss.com to get it easily.

Discord

This one's a bit iffy and could be outdated by the time you find this article. But as of the time of writing, discordo is the only actively maintained command line Discord client.

It's really only useful for textual communication, and it can do everything that's expected from a Discord client on that front. But that's about it. No attachments, no video or audio conferencing, no server management, etc.

This means it's probably not a good solution for many people, but if you're just chatting with friends, then it should be okay.

Alternatively, if you just want to chat with people there's always the venerable IRC, which has many clients for command line or GUI.

Conclusion

There are a lot of things you can do on the Internet that I haven't discussed here, though you should have a taste of what's possible without a web browser! Ultimately, it's up to you what to use, whether it be a GUI or command line client, or inside a web browser.