How to Use Lynx for CentOS
Lynx is a text-based Web browser. It supports just about everything that’s been approved as standards for HTML, including frames (indirectly) and images, animations, etc. (if you set up proper external programs to act like “plug-ins” to handle these types). Also, it has the virtues of being faster than any graphical browser, available on your Uhura accounts, and able to run over any standard terminal connection — so you don’t have to grab a workstation at CLARC, you can use the text terminals in B&L, or …
The homepage for Lynx is at lynx.browser.org (although I’ve been having some trouble reaching that site sometimes), and once you’re in Lynx you can get to pretty good help screens by hitting “h”.
So, to run Lynx, from your Uhura command prompt enter “lynx”. Or, if you know the URL for the site you want to start at, provide that as an argument to the program; for instance, to run Lynx and start on my home page, you’d enter “lynx http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~mbanks/”.
Within Lynx, you use the arrow (cursor) keys to navigate: up and down move the highlight from one link to the previous and next, respectively; right selects that link (which will go to the indicated site or download the indicated file, as appropriate); and left backtracks to the previous page you were on.
Some other useful keys are: the space bar, to go immediately down a page in the currently displayed document (faster, especially if there are lots of links on the currently displayed page); “p”, which prints the document you’re currently looking at; and “=”, which shows you what the URLs are for both the document you’re in and (if any) the link your highlight cursor is one.
To type in a URL to go to, from within Lynx, use “G” (that’s a capital letter), then type in the URL (appears at the bottom) and hit Enter.
To quit Lynx, you can hit either “q” or “Q”; the difference is that if you use the lowercase, Lynx prompts you to be sure you want to quit.
That’s about it for basic usage! For doing things like creating bookmark files, etc., see the help files (hit “h” from within Lynx) or leave a comment.