Re: lynx-dev Re: suggestions for new features

[Jan Hlavacek]

On Wed, Apr 22, 1998 at 06:20:51PM -0400, Jacob Poon wrote:
> Speaking of downloading, does anyone interested/tried integrating wget and
> Lynx?  In particular, I would like so see someone who will make Lynx to
> call wget for all (well, make it remote) URL requests, then wget returns
> the data and Lynx puts it into the cache, then Lynx renders cache contents
> and display it.  This will allow Lynx developers to concentrate more on
> HTML handling, as well as provide integrated support for download
> recovery.

This sounds interesting.   I don't know about anything even remotely
like that,  but there is a way how to download thing wia wget from lynx.
If you configure lynx with --enable-externs switch,  you can define
external programs in your lynx.cfg to handle various kinds of URLs,  for
example one for ftp,  one for http,  one for mailto and so on.  If you
press `.',  the current link url will be passed to the appropriate
external program.  For example,  I have the following in my lynx.cfg:

EXTERNAL:ftp:wget -qr -nH -nd '%s' &:TRUE
EXTERNAL:http:wget -q '%s' &:TRUE
EXTERNAL:mailto:/home/lahvak/bin/mailtohandler %s:TRUE

The first two will download ftp file or directory or a web page,  the
last one is a shell script which extracts the addresses and other
information from mailto urls and passes them to a mail user agent. 

This way I can download things in the background,  and I can send mail
to addresses on the web using all the bells and whistles of mutt,
without having to cut and paste addresses and so on.

Incidentaly,  I would like to report a minor bug in the externals
support.  When you press `.' on a page with no links on it,  lynx
dumps core.  I wanted to look at the source before reporting it,  but I
will be extremely busy for next couple of weeks,  so if somebody wants
to try it first,  go ahead.

-- 
Jan Hlav\'{a}\v{c}ek
address@hidden  (Blind Carbon Copies will bounce)
www: http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~lahvak/