Classnotes | UNIX01 | RecentChanges | Preferences Because the UNIX command line is such a robust environment, it should come as no surprise that there are a wide variety of utilities for accessing the World Wide Web from the command-line. We could easily spend a whole class examining them all, so we will only look at the most common today.
Lynx
Lynx is a command-line World Wide Web browser. It was one of the first for UNIX systems, and is still in use today. You use the keyboard arrow keys (or meta keys when the arrow keys do not exist or are not mapped) to navigate. The enter key will follow a link in a web-site.
Lynx is a very basic browser. It supports some cookie transactions, and much of the HTML standards, but does not support tables or any modern XHTML/CSS/XSL/etc. standards.
Because of some licensing restrictions, and because there are now better alternatives, lynx is not always included in modern Linux and UNIX systems.
Links
Links began as a more free (as in freedom) alternative to lynx. However, development for links over the years have added some remarkable functionality to it. It can support much of the modern web-standards as well as Javascript. Plus, it can do all of this in a very small package.
Links originally was simply a text-based browser, just like lynx, but with more functionality. It's interface was even very similar to lynx, but with pull-down menus activated by pressing ESC:
However, it now even sports a full graphical browsing mode which can be accessed from the command-line (either in an X Windows environment or in a "headless" machine using SVGAlib):
NOTE: This graphical mode is most likely not present yet in your distribution of choice. It is relatively new, and not always enabled when built. If you do not want to wait for it to be released for your Linux distro, then you will want to obtain the latest source for links here: http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/links/
