wick

A minimal terminal web ecosystem. No images, no scripts, no layout engines — just text, links, and color.

Wick is a quiet alternative to the modern web. A wick site is a collection of plain .wax files served over HTTP or read from disk. A wick browser is a terminal program that renders them. That's the whole thing.

A .wax file is a plain text file. Every line is one of four types, determined by how it starts:

#Header text              → bold, indented 4 spaces
##Subheader text          → bold, indented 2 spaces
=> URL label text         → a numbered link: [1] label text
anything else             → plain text

Links can point to local files or remote URLs:

=> notes.wax              My notes
=> https://example.com/   Example site
=> https://example.com/data.csv#data.csv   Download dataset

A link URL ending with #filename (no spaces) is a download link — the browser will prompt before saving the file to ~/Downloads/.

Text lines support inline color codes with $$x syntax:

this is $$agreen$$r and this is $$cred$$r and back to normal

Color codes only work in text lines — not in headers, subheaders, or link labels. Color state resets at the end of each line.

text/x-wax

Den is the official wick browser. It runs in any standard terminal.

Build:

gcc -Wall -Wextra -o den den.c -lncurses -lcurl

Run:

./den                          # opens home page
./den path/to/file.wax         # open a local file
./den https://example.com/index.wax

Controls:

Links with #filename in the URL trigger a download prompt instead of navigation. Den shows the filename, file size, and destination before downloading.

A wick site is just .wax files on a web server, usually with an index.wax as the entry point. Hosting one is no different from hosting static files.

index.wax
about.wax
posts/
  first-post.wax
  second-post.wax

A Wikipedia-to-wax converter. Fetches Wikipedia articles and serves them as wax documents so you can browse Wikipedia through den.

Requires: Python 3, beautifulsoup4

pip install beautifulsoup4

CLI — convert a single article:

python3 wickypedia.py "Python (programming language)"
python3 wickypedia.py "Ada Lovelace" -o ada.wax
python3 wickypedia.py "Gopher protocol" -l en -o gopher.wax

Server — browse Wikipedia live through den:

python3 wickypedia.py --serve           # starts on port 8421
python3 wickypedia.py --serve --port 9000

Then in den, navigate to:

http://localhost:8421/Ada_Lovelace
http://localhost:8421/Python_(programming_language)
http://localhost:8421/?q=black+holes    ← search

Spaces in article titles can be written as underscores or %20. Links inside articles point back to the local server automatically.

• No binary formats. Wax files are readable as plain text without a browser.
• No scripting. Documents are static.
• No images. Terminal cells are characters.
• No custom protocol. Wax is served over HTTP/HTTPS or read from local files.
• Keyboard only. No mouse support in den.
• Lightweight. Should run fine on any low-end machine from the past 15 years.

Wick is not trying to be Gemini, Gopher, or a web replacement. It makes no claims about privacy, federation, or the future of the internet. It is a small, self-contained thing for people who like small, self-contained things.

MIT — see LICENSE.