TEXTFILES.COM Browser

Back when the internet was weird, wonderful, and made entirely of text.

A terminal browser for textfiles.com — Jason Scott's incredible archive of BBS-era text files. Anarchy cookbooks, hacker manifestos, game walkthroughs, conspiracy theories, and digital folklore from the 1980s-90s. Before social media. Before web 2.0. Before everything got sanitized.

This is how we used to browse.

Build

git clone <repo>
cd textfiles
cargo build --release
./target/release/textfiles-browser

Controls

• j/k or arrows — navigate
• Enter — open
• Backspace — go back
• q — quit

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:

• 80x30 character grid (classic DOS text mode)
• 2x scaled Perfect DOS VGA 437 font
• Phosphor green on black color scheme

Optional Dependencies

For old school mode:

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

Requirements

Rust 1.75+ and a mass case of nostalgia.

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