Lynx is a ''fully-featured WWW client for users running cursor-addressable, character-cell display devices.'' In short, it's a text-only web page and document viewer. Currently Lynx is available for Unix, Linux, VMS, Windows 3.x/9x/NT, OS/2, 386DOS, and EMX.

So, what's so great about surfing web pages without being able to all of the pretty graphics and pictures? Well, I like to compare viewing the Web with Lynx vs. GUI browsers to reading a newspaper vs. a magazine. With Lynx, you can focus on the content (text) on a web site without the distraction of terrible colour schemes, annoying banner ads and pop-up windows. Also, Lynx loads web pages faster, due to the fact that you're not having to wait for the many graphic files that fill up your bandwidth. This is great for those who are using dial-up Internet services and/or those who have older PCs.

Using Lynx

Using Lynx is an easy thing to do. It's likely that it was copied on to your PC when you were installing your Linux distro. If it isn't on your PC, you can download it here!

To get it running, open up a terminal window and at the command prompt, type: lynx then press ENTER. This will start Lynx with the default home page. At the bottom of the screen, you should see a two or three line ''main menu.'' To access any one of these menu items, simply type the first initial of the menu headings (eg. h for the Help Screen).

Navigating the web with Lynx is similar to any other web browser, except you use keyboard commands. There are many commands that are available to you, but I'm going to just touch on the more common ones to help you get started. If you like using Lynx, you can find out more by typing h or ? for the Help Menu and o for the Options Menu.

First, let's access a web page.

You can view any .html or .txt file on your own system, simply by typing their file names. For now, I'll assume that your Internet connection is up and running. From the Lynx home page, type g for Go To. You should see URL to open appear just above the Main Menu. Type: www.linux.com then press ENTER. You may get cookie notifications appearing as the web page loads. You can answer to them by choosing one of the responses Lynx provides to you (Y,N,A, etc…). From here, it's simply using your keyboard to move about the page. This is the Linux.com web page at its purest form… no graphics or fancy buttons or ads (the marketing department's worst nightmare ;o).
The navigation keys are simple. Down Arrow or Tab to go to the next link on the page, Up Arrow or Shift/Tab to go to the previous link. ENTER or Right Arrow to access the link and Left Arrow to return to the previous web page. To read the parts of the web page that do not appear on the screen, use Page Up and Page Down keys.

Lynx also supports bookmarks. You type a to add a bookmark to your personal list (followed by d for the current document, l to add the highlighted hyper-link, or c to cancel). When you want to access your bookmarks again, you type v, and select from the list. If you know what web pages you'd like to have bookmarked, but don't want to have to visit each one and manually add them to your list, you can edit your Lynx bookmark file manually by opening up lynx_bookmarks.html, which should reside in your /home/[user name] directory, with your favorite text editor (vim, emacs, etc.). You may have to add at least one bookmark through Lynx for this file to get created by the system (although you could create this file yourself, there is a specific layout you must follow in order for Lynx to access it properly).

Lynx can also search a web page for words or character strings. Simply type / (forward slash) and then the text you're looking for. Lynx will highlight any matches it finds on the current page, and page down to the first one within the document.

When you're done surfing with Lynx, type q and you'll return to your command line.

You may notice that Lynx does not display the pages in any special format (tables, CSS, etc.). It will display the contents of the html file from left to right, top to bottom. Here's where the talent of html writing comes through. Create a web page that looks good in both a GUI browser as well as a text browser, like Lynx, and you've done a good job… well, in my opinion.

There's a lot more you can do with Lynx, but this should be enough to get you started. If you do a lot of research on the Net, but find yourself getting bogged down by needless graphics and banner ads, give Lynx a try.

Open Lynx With an Alternative Home Page

You can get Lynx to start up with a different page, other than the default home page, simply by adding the file name or URL to the end of the lynx command. At the command prompt, type: lynx www.virtualsky.net then press ENTER. Lynx will open and take you directly to www.virtualsky.net. Replace the URL with the web page you want to go to. -Dave

View your site in the Lynx text-only browser

Use the Lynx Viewer (NOTE: The page has a flickering image) to see roughly how your site would look in a text browser. You can also check pages from our website or any other web designer's site. Type in the address of the website you want to view in the form on their site and press go. Your page will be returned in text only format. You can follow the links on your page to view other pages on your site.

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