The edbrowse home page is edbrowse.org. Chris Brannon is the current project maintainer and webmaster.
Karl Dahlke wrote the first version of edbrowse in perl, in 2001, and he is still the principal developer of the project.
This program is copyright © Karl Dahlke (and other authors and contributors), 2001-2018. It is made available by the authors under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), as articulated by the Free Software Foundation. It may be used for any purpose, and redistributed, provided this copyright notice is included.
Edbrowse is provided as-is, with no implied warranty of fitness for any particular purpose. It might trash your precious files. It might send bad data across the Internet, causing you to buy a $37,000 elephant instead of $37 worth of printer supplies. It may delete all the rows in your mysql customer table. This is a spare-time project written by a couple of volunteers, that (understandably) cannot attain the quality and rigor of corporate or government software. By using this program, you agree to use it as-is.
Chris Brannon wrote or modified at least 20% of the code, and provided valuable ideas for the overall design. Adam Thompson converted the javascript interface from C to C++, as required by Mozilla JS versions 2, and he continues to direct the project's overall architecture. Kevin Carhart deciphered the mysteries of jquery, and upgraded the DOM to support it. Jeremy O'Brien ported the software to Mac OS X, and Geoff McLane provided the Windows port, and a general cmake configure and build system. Several people translated the output and error messages into other languages, and they are given due credit in the Languages section below.
This program is, at first glance, a reimplementation of /bin/ed. In fact you might issue a few ed commands and not realize that you are actually running this program. But as you proceed you will eventually discover some discrepancies, areas where edbrowse differs from ed. These are discussed below.
Reinventing ed seems like a complete waste of time, until you realize that this program also acts as a browser - a browser embedded inside ed. You can edit a URL as easily as a local file, and activate browse mode to render the html tags in a manner that is appropriate for a command-response program such as this. In other words, we discard most of the formatting information and retain the links and fill-out forms. This allows blind users to access the Internet through an application that is compatible with the linear nature of speech or braille.
Edbrowse presents the following features:
Edbrowse can edit multiple files or browse multiple websites simultaneously, and transfer blocks of text between them in a manner similar to cut&paste.
For instance, edbrowse *.c accesses all the C sourcefiles in the current directory.
The regular expressions of ed have been replaced with Perl Compatible Regular Expressions, which have more power and fle