TEXTFILES.COM Browser

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.

Install

cargo install --git https://github.com/nesdeq/textfiles
textfiles-browser

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/nesdeq/textfiles
cd textfiles
cargo build --release
./target/release/textfiles-browser

Controls

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.

Old School Mode

For the authentic 1990s BBS experience, use the included launcher scripts:

./run.sh    # POSIX shell
./run.fish  # fish shell

These 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

Optional dependencies

• Alacritty — GPU-accelerated terminal
• Perfect DOS VGA 437 — authentic DOS font

Built with

• ratatui — terminal UI framework
• crossterm — cross-platform terminal control
• reqwest — HTTP client
• scraper — HTML parsing

Requirements

Rust 1.85+ (2024 edition) and a massive case of nostalgia.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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"The files are out there." — textfiles.com