Back when the internet was weird, wonderful, and made entirely of text.
A terminal browser for textfiles.com — Jason Scott's archive of BBS-era text files. Anarchy cookbooks, hacker manifestos, game walkthroughs, conspiracy theories, and digital folklore from the 1980s and 90s. Before social media. Before web 2.0. Before everything got sanitized.
This is how we used to browse.
cargo install --git https://github.com/nesdeq/textfiles
textfiles-browserOr build from source:
git clone https://github.com/nesdeq/textfiles
cd textfiles
cargo build --release
./target/release/textfiles-browser| Key | Action |
|---|---|
j / k / arrows |
Navigate |
g / G |
Top / end |
PgUp / PgDn |
Page jump |
Enter |
Open |
Backspace / Esc |
Back |
r |
Refresh |
q / Ctrl-C |
Quit |
In the text viewer, b / Space page up and down.
For the authentic 1990s BBS experience, use the included launcher scripts:
./run.sh # POSIX shell
./run.fish # fish shellThese launch the browser in Alacritty with:
- 80×30 character grid (classic DOS text mode)
- Perfect DOS VGA 437 font at 32pt
- Phosphor green on black
- Alacritty — GPU-accelerated terminal
- Perfect DOS VGA 437 — authentic DOS font
- ratatui — terminal UI framework
- crossterm — cross-platform terminal control
- reqwest — HTTP client
- scraper — HTML parsing
Rust 1.85+ (2024 edition) and a massive case of nostalgia.
MIT — see LICENSE.
"The files are out there." — textfiles.com