DSL Tips and Tricks :: Small Howto for Netrik internet browser



On the forum I found a few posts of people who didn't know how to use this program or complained because there is no documentation, and as the manpage is not very clear I found it might be good to write a small howto.

If you use Firefox you can of course start Netrik in a terminal with :

netrik file:///home/dsl/.mozilla/firefox/your_profile/bookmarks.html

but this doesn't look very good. The best I found was to create a /home/dsl/.netrik folder with a custom bookmarks.html in it. If you have a lot of bookmarks you can also create one .html file for each category, and then link to those in the main bookmarks.html. The format of those files should be very simple : names of the links to be displayed and links themselves, with some introductory text (My bookmarks...) Maybe some colors. With Nvu you can do this very quickly.

To search on Google with Netrik I put this link on top of my bookmarks file : http://wap.google.com. When you're on the wap page if you use the cursor key and hit enter on the search bar you will be prompted for a keyword to search for, after entering that just hit enter on Google Search ! (Netrik generally displays much less rubbish on WAP pages)

These 3 lines are probably the most important you might need in your configuration file, /home/dsl/.netrikrc :

--bright-background (if you have a transparent terminal, or at least you need this in mrxvt)
--bw (if you don't want colors in the text)
file:///home/dsl/.netrik/bookmarks.html

To conclude this is the official documentation :

http://www.penguin-soft.com/penguin/man/1/netrik.print
http://www.penguin-soft.com/penguin/man/5/netrikrc.html

I believe every little tool in DSL can prove to be useful if you're willing to learn how to use it. Anyway for me Netrik is a very handy little text browser, and unlike dillo it displays special characters (French, German,...)
I've followed the Netrik How To and have setup the recommended folders/files but am having a problem in getting Netrik to recognise the .netrikrc configuration file when entering "netrik .netrikrc" at the command line.

Instead of invoking the configuration the terminal simply displays the file content.

But If I enter "netrik /home/dsl/.netrik/bookmarks.html" the program launches and displays the links in the bookmarks.html file ready for browsing.

Has anything changed since the How To was posted which would account for this?
Quote
Instead of invoking the configuration the terminal simply displays the file content.

The rc file is a default configuration, you need not manually invoke it. If you don't offer a flag option for an alternate rc file (which I don't know if netrik even allows), you're telling netrik to open that particular file. So netrik is doing precisely what you're telling it ("open this particular file"), even though that's apparently not what you want it to do.
Quote (lucky13 @ Feb. 06 2008,23:15)
Quote

The rc file is a default configuration, you need not manually invoke it. If you don't offer a flag option for an alternate rc file (which I don't know if netrik even allows), you're telling netrik to open that particular file. So netrik is doing precisely what you're telling it ("open this particular file"), even though that's apparently not what you want it to do.

According to the Netrik documentation a file entry in the .netrikrc config file causes the URL(s) therein to be displayed ready to browse.

My config file contains:

--bright-background
--bw
--no-anchor-offset
file:///home/dsl/.netrik/bookmarks.html

The file bookmarks.html contains:

<html>
<head>
<title>Netrik Bookmarks</title>
<body>
<p><a href="http://wap.google.com/">Google</a></p>
<p><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/">BBC News</a></p>
<p><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport/">BBC Sport</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/ukweather/">BBC Weather</a></p>
<p><a href="http://wap.ft.com/">Financial Times</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.yell.com/">Yellow Pages</a></p>
</body>
</html>

IMHO netrik doesn't seem to be doing what it says on the tin.
Got an effective but inelegant solution that turns netrik into a pseudo news feed as follows.

1. commented out the file reference in file "home/dsl/.netrikrc"
2. deleted folder "/home/dsl/.netrik" and bookmarks.html file therein
3. created the following file "home/dsl/news.html":

<html>
<head>
<title>Netrik News</title>
<body>
<p><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm">BBC News via Netrik</a></p>
</body>
</html>

3. Launch program with "netrik news.html"

Goes like a rocket.
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