Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's lynx(1). Which is amusing because it's been scheduled for today on my calendar since the beginning of the month, but @neil chose to share links(1) today as well, for many of the same reasons. 😆

It's been around for decades—I used it to browse gopherspace (and maybe WAIS?) in the 90s via a 1200 baud dial-up connection to a shell account and later the nascent WWW when it arrived.

Sadly, ClownFlare, Google, and anti-AI-bot/scraper tech has made many formerly-accessible-with-lynx sites now inaccessible, some blocking by User-Agent, some blocking due to the lack of JavaScript support.

But it has the right amount of usability and friction, so I can use it from my command-line-only writer-deck netbook to do a little research or read some HTML documentation, without getting sucked into the modern web.

My custom configuration puts it in Advanced mode (no help-bar at the bottom), specifies vi-key-bindings, a custom color-scheme, uses links-and-form-fields-are-numbered making it easy to jump to them, and text-fields-require-activation so I don't get stuck in text input boxes when using j/k to scroll up/down in the document.

I also have a couple shell wrapper-functions to invoke lynx on particular URLs (Wikipedia, dictionary/thesaurus/rhyming resources, web search, etc) with the CLI arguments filled in.

I also have mutt configured to show text/html messages in lynx (either using `lynx -dump` and the internal pager, or using `m` from the attachments menu to view it interactively)