Lynx Browser: The Land That Time Revived (2022)

That's why I play dungeon crawl stone soup in the terminal. I'm defending myself against fire dragons and dodging iron shots, but it looks like I'm aggressively debugging something.

Only problem is having to type https:// in front of news.ycombinator.com because lynx assumes you’re trying to make an nntp connection to anything with a “news” subdomain.

Bad YC!

> . Its darn FAST, has no remote code execution

I mean, I’m sure it has its vulnerabilities, but nobody is actively looking for them.

I use that with mutt to view html formatted email. here is the 30 second tutorial.

In .mailcap include the line

    text/html; lynx -dump -width=78 %s | sed 's/^   //'; copiousoutput; needsterminal; nametemplate=%s.html

    auto_view text/html

I did not know that it had that feature, and having just tried it out it does work really well. Its output kind of reminds me of the gemini protocol and its markup format[0],

[0]: https://geminiprotocol.net/

That is amazing, and just what I've been looking for to archive blogs and comments. Thanks so much!

that is very useful information -- does it work with sites that need logins?

Another option I'm working on: https://sr.ht/~bptato/chawan

Chawan also renders CSS + images, but unlike the above two, it comes with its own browser engine (from scratch). It also does JS with QuickJS - if you're lucky :P (Lately I got Transmission's web UI to load, quite happy about that.)

> if your browser doesn't know what JS is

It's worse than that[0] - Lynx statically renders the page at load time which means any "dynamic" updates just can't happen. I did have a bash at integrating the Mozilla JS engine but gave up after realising that anything more than just `document.write("flange")` handled at load time would need the entire inner engine rewriting and that was/is far beyond me[1].

[0] This is based off my memories of the Lynx source back in the Olden Times, ~1995-2000ish.

[1] But I did do the original cookie jar and colour styles (as seen in the screenshots) work (`lynx.lss` is all my fault, sorry)

FYI, w3m also supports this.

In fact w3m was originally intended as a filesystem browser and file pager, with HTML functionality added to it. See: <https://w3m.sourceforge.net/>

I have to assume it's a chrome-specific comment, because I have not noticed anything different with it (or my browsing experience) on firefox (nor heard anyone else complain about differences).

There's also "eww" that comes with Emacs.

IME it's usually good enough for reading docs and stuff like that.

Linux user here.

I use links in graphical mode (links -g) quite a bit. It's easy to turn image display on and off with the '*' key. Image sizes can be scaled with the menu and they take effect immediately. If one hovers over an image link and types "i", the image itself is displayed, and there's an option to scale the image to fit the window. Getting a new links window is easy (Alt-F n). One gripe is that hitting Ctrl-C will close the window (the 'Q' key does this already)

I use lynx as a second line of defense when some sites refuse to work with links, because lynx is sometimes able to display them (different user agent?). I also have been recently using lynx within xterm (disabling the alternate screen) for forums where posted URLs are not clickable (text only) in combination with xterm's dabbrev-expand() function to quickly copy such URLs in lynx's goto prompt. As an aside: in xterm's misc.c there's a a macro (IS_WORD_CONSTITUENT) that can be easily expanded to exclude characters that are not part of a URL, such as braces.

I do worry that more and more websites will simply show "Suspicious Activity Detected" for these browsers. As mentioned so many times on HN, text browser users are a minority and text browsers are obsolete. I did once send a message to a website owner and later saw that I could access the site, but didn't get an acknowledgement by email, so I can't be sure if it was in response to my request. There still are some websites that degrade gracefully, and, despite complaints by the server, allow text input windows and submit buttons to still work.

I always found links the most pleasant. A big factor was how often lynx asked about cookies, but now I know from the article I can set it to reject all I might revisit lynx. w3m seemed to set itself apart with the ability to show graphics which I didn't care about so never really gave it a chance.

w3m here, for a number of reasons:

- Vim-like keybindings. I've used lynx off and on for decades, but can never internalise its keybindings, and I'm constantly surprised (in a bad way) and frustrated.

- Support for table-based layout. This is less frequently encountered online these days, though some sites (HN and pg's own blog site) still use tables.

- Graphics support, should you want that.

- Extensive settings with a good management interface.

- Pretty darned good bookmarks management. My w3m bookmarks page is my default homepage for the browser, and gives ready access to a bunch of useful sites.

- Better default formatting settings, in particular concerning paragraph breaks and the like. Lynx to me is too crowded when rendering webpages.

- Most of what Lynx can do w3m does as well, in terms of basic functionality, piping input and output, etc.

I fairly regularly try out other terminal browser options (lynx, links, elinks, etc.) but w3m is my happy place.

I use lynx to view HTML emails in Neomutt, but if I want to browse the web I use w3m as it doesn't whine at me about cookie storage multiple times for every site.

i use w3m, last time checked it's more updated than lynx. w3m is also utf8 ready,lynx not. w3m-img can display images in terminal,lynx can't

some web pages are best read using curl

or nc <hostname> 80