Re: [9fans] Downloading from the web

[Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>]

> Can you download with Charon ?

There was an undocumented way to do this in old versions of charon, but
it was sort of buggy (you could only download things it didn't
understand the MIME type for), and has been removed in the most recent
version of Inferno (err, sorta.  The function in question called a
dialog function that's been removed).

> Or should I use webfs ? I `m not really
> getting webfs. Ftpfs works great , but doesn`t seem to work on websites.

Well, there's always hget, but that's extraordinarily inconvenient for
most things (like when you get some *really huge* URL that you have to
try and transfer to a command line somewhere).

Charon isn't so bad, and I built an old version just to get the
download feature, but I noticed a few things that I don't like about it
and have a wish list for it.  Here it is.

(1) I spend 99% of my time with a web browser either looking at things
to read, or trying to download files (like PDF and latex documents).
For just reading, Charon works acceptably well (though the Javascript
support isn't great), but it's a pain not to be able to download
arbitrary links.  Wouldn't it be nice if button 3 brought up a dialog
tha would let me save a link into a local file?  (And wouldn't it also
be nice if the dialog had the URL I was downloading in it some I could
give the file some sensible name?)

(2) Button 2 putting the URL you click it on in the status bar is
really helpful, but would be infinitely more helpful if there was a
button ``Snarf URL'' that did the obvious thing.

(3) Finally, I miss the ability to start charon outside of wm.  Please
bring it back!  I, like most everyone else, used to have a script
called ``charon'' that did the right thing to bring up charon in a
window, but now I have to actually start inferno ``like normal'' just
to get to the web browser, even when I don't want to use the rest of
Inferno.

In general, the solution for web browsers under Plan 9 is to vnc into
some more common environment (like a Unix machine) and run a browser
there.  That's inconvenient if, like me, you don't have another machine
to vnc into.

	- Dan C.