Text UI browsers aren’t as common now as they once were, but they are more refreshing to use than ever before. The modern web is a stream of constant annoyances, ads, terrible design. Using Lynx can instantly transport a person back to a slightly better time.

Most people would assume that such a browser is completely useless in the current year, but this isn’t true at all. First, duckduckgo is accessible as seen above, but check this out:

Thanks to frogfind.com by Action Retro, all of Wikipedia awaits! Not only this, but bad layouts and other annoying elements are gone. Much of the internet becomes immediately accessible from Lynx via Frog Find. Additionally, you can cruise Google News via 68k.news which is also made available from Action Retro.

The operation of the Lynx web browser is very straight forward. To start just do

lynx http://frogfind.com

Up and down will navigate from one link to another, and tab will take you to the next link as well. The back arrow will take you back. The forward arrow will activate a link. Pressing Q will exit. The / will allow you to search within the page. The space bar will page down, as will PGDN, and PGUP will likewise page up. Pressing G will allow you to type a new URL.

Lynx also has bookmarks. Essentially, Lynx will save URLs as links in a local HTML file, and it has some functions for editing and deleting those links as well. If you press “a” you will be prompted to press d, l, or c. If you press d, then the current document will be saved as a bookmark. If you press l, the currently highlighted link will be added as a bookmark. If you press c, you will cancel the bookmark process. Pressing “v” will allow you to view bookmarks. When highlighting a bookmark, you can edit it by pressing e, or you can remove it by pressing r.

Lynx has some useful configuration options as well. If you want to use them, first do

export LYNX_CFG="$HOME/.lynxrc"

Then, you can create your config. Mine looks like

SET_COOKIES:TRUE
ACCEPT_ALL_COOKIES:ON
COOKIE_FILE:~/.lynx_cookies
DEFAULT_BOOKMARK_FILE:~/.lynx_bookmarks.html
DEFAULT_EDITOR:vim
PREFERRED_LANGUAGE:en
SAVE_SPACE:~/Downloads/
STARTFILE:http://frogfind.com
VIEWER:application/postscript:view_attachment.sh %s&:XWINDOWS
VIEWER:image/gif:view_attachment.sh %s&:XWINDOWS
VIEWER:image/x-xbm:view_attachment.sh %s&:XWINDOWS
VIEWER:image/png:view_attachment.sh %s&:XWINDOWS
VIEWER:image/tiff:view_attachment.sh %s&:XWINDOWS
VIEWER:image/jpeg:view_attachment.sh %s&:XWINDOWS
VIEWER:video/mpeg:view_attachment.sh %s &:XWINDOWS

This should serve to get you started with Lynx. Enjoy it!