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by mlang23 1705 days ago
As a diehard terminal user, I think this headline should interest me. However, I am assuming this is some sort of JavaScript perversion? Visiting the link with lynx gives an empty page. Can anyone explain whats going on there to a non-GUI user?
5 comments

Keyboard doesn't open on FF Android, so I can't use it (right now) either, but it seems to be a faux shell & TUI for searching DDG.

(I see green on black terminal aesthetic, $ prompt and a flashing cursor - banner text (in the 'shell') above explains I can (if the keyboard would open) run :help (or :send-feedback to tell them the keyboard doesn't w-- oh) which I assume would tell me how to query the search engine.)

Yeah, presumably JS if you can't load it. Though from what I can see without typing anything it could be done in CSS. (I suppose it's probably a SPA - results loaded in place without a page reload which, to be fair, would ruin the faux shell aesthetic.)

Thanks for taking the time to explain what you see. This sort of confirms my initial suspicion. Weird.
Maybe this will be an alternative interface that suits you: https://github.com/jarun/ddgr

There's also these JS-free interfaces: https://html.duckduckgo.com/html https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

yes it's just a webpage styled to look like a terminal. not sure what the big deal is
FWIW, the regular (or rather, lite) duckduckgo runs nicely in a TUI browser like elinks. THat's my search engine of choice when text-browsing.
It's JavaScript / jQuery, so yeah it's not going to work in Lynx.