How and why to use Lynx – the faster web browser

But the killer app for me with web browsers is link hints, like in several browser extensions (e.g. vrome, tridactyl) and in browsers like qutebrowser. It takes a little getting used to at first to use efficiently, but I hate not having it when I use Lynx or w3m.

Slightly apropos, and for what it's worth, I've noticed that 99% of my browsing seems to be or start from maybe 20 or so web sites. I've started creating shell aliases to open those sites and there is no reason not to use the best browser for the site for each one. It works well with a philosophy like seems to be the one behind the surf browser, where you open each thing in its own window and use your window manager to deal with it, instead of using tabs.

But I used to use it more often. Some years ago I worked mostly on a terminal window and by using lynx, I could browse the internet while everybody thought I was doing some serious work on the server (folks over there respected people working on black text-based screens)

Slow and perhaps also unusable --- such as the popular anti-pattern of requiring JS to render static text, a great example of that being Twitter.

    text/html; lynx -width 72 -assume_charset=%{charset} -display_charset=utf-8 -dump %s | sed 's|^   ||'; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput

My blog's homepage is dominated by that construction, so my preferred alternative is w3m.

I've set up various aliases in my dotfile repo that make it easy for me to do search through Lynx to google, ddg, wikipedia etc as well as instantly bring up my most used and read news (and other) sites.

It is really rather handy when you get used to it. But it simply could never replace a modern browser due to the JS dependencies needed.

I've been messing with Gemini and some of its browsers (I'm a big fan of Lagrange) and I have to say it is spectacular. The markup language for documents is great, the extremely limited functionality is great (although I'd like to see italics and bold text) and I really like the mostly thoughtful content. That latter one would probably change if it picks up a lot of steam, but so far I wish all websites who's audience is just reading were Gemini documents.

I have at various times found myself unable to use a GUI, and these browsers saved my butt finding information to restore my system.

This is why I test all functionality in all three of them and ensure that they are just as able to use the site (or better) as Chrome Canary.

Yes, you can do some sort of accessibility testing with it (and I'm sure it is an useful tool for a lot more corner cases) but I was expecting a lot more after reading the title

Browsing stackoverflow and forums with lynx is possible and saves you in situations when your graphics card drivers fail for some reason.

I occasionally use eww, though it a bit of unerogonomic pain. Esp without url autocomplete based on browser history.

Though I'm sure I could yak shave that with some elisp if I was motivated enough

(Firefox seems to eat all 8GBs or my RAM lately so it's getting more tempting)

I've started using Lagrange probably more than I ought to lately.

PAGER='lynx stdin' perl -d my/dev/server.pl

... hit a breapoint

| p $mech->content # nicely rendered html in the pager

No thanks.

'void main() {}'

I can play full games like krunker.io right now in browser with minimal lag.

I hope all the OS developers are taking note. OS might be just a browser plugin in the future instead of the other way round.

Humans have a brain that soaks new information like a sponge. Internet is the new crack. Having a limited browser is sad.

Edit: ok I tried it. I have to allow 2-3 cookies to run google.com. Facebook doesnot run. I think its a niche thing. Like among peers it would be fun to learn to run and run it but not a stable thing.