links - text based web browser

It was around midnight, that my room-mate (who is a budding linux geek) saw me downloading kernel files using wget from a terminal without the help of any kind of grahpical web browser. Then we wondered, how cool it would be if we could use a text based web-browser for our general work like checking mail, facebook status, attendance over college's intranet etc. I reckoned, it would be quite fast too because no imager or flash ads would be downloaded.

A few hours later I had accomplished installing xfce4 desktop manager on Arch Linux and was fiddling around with its features (which were nothing except a text editor, a terminal emulator and few configuration utilities). Just then a shortcut for a web-browser caught my eye and I couldn't recall having installed pacakges of firefox or anything. Out of curiosity I clicked it open and bang a terminal window opened up !!! there it was !! I had discovered a text based web-browser !!!
Little bit of fooling around got me familiar with its UI which is nothing except a few menus that emerge when escape key is pressed. I opened google.com (dunno why but google.com is what comes to mind even when what I want to do is just check internet connectivity). There was no limit of his excitement when I introduced Abhinandan to my marvellous discovery. Together we tried exploring a lot of sites on it. It was a new kind of experience looking at the usual web content in text mode. We searched wikipedia for the creator of "links" and checked our gmail accounts. However the intranet utility of our university wouldn't let us log in ( a few months ago we could't log in even from mozilla - only IE was supported :P so no worries). Regular facebook didn't show up properly, however m.facebook.com which is its mobile version, was wonderful, I updated my status and checked notifications.
Then my room-mate suggested how about downloading something .. so we opened an ftp site and pressed enter (which was equivalent to clicking there) on a link. A pop up menu appeared asking what I would like to do with the file ( display or a save). Actually display option opened any file in text mode and displayed its contents - which wasn't something I wanted. Upon choosing save, another popup window appeared which displayed the progress of download. This one even contained an option for continuing the download in background which seemed to be quite useful for this kind of a browser.
And now here I am writing a blog post at about 6 AM using the same geeky browser.
Its not a very impressive but is quite wonderful (atleast for a comp-geek who had never seen something similar). Links sports a download manager, bookmark manager, short history, and a very helpful user's manual:). It can come quite handy when we need to access internet while fixing up something on our linux box. For example I was using my other laptop for accessing the arch linux install guide for installing the distro and now I won't need to. I can visit forums, check facebook status, mail, search for stuff even when I am fiddling around with the OS or am trying to get it back on after screwing it up ;)