lynx-dev Any way to pass a literal ESC to the terminal?

[David West]

I would like to be able to view a local text file which contains ANSI
color escape codes, and have Lynx pass these codes to the terminal, which
knows how to interpret them.  I thought that this should be possible
by setting the display charset to Transparent, and/or also setting the
assumed document charset to x-transparent, but I haven't found a way to
get it to work.  Any hints would be appreciated.

The local text files concerned contain no special headers, and have no
special filename extension.  As far as I can tell, they should therefore
be treated by Lynx as text/plain.  When I cat them to the terminal, I
see the ANSI color as I expect.  These files are the leaf nodes of
a hypertext tree.  Since I am formatting them myself, I could give
them extra headers (but what?) if that's what it takes to see the colors.

The actual appearance of these files, using Lynx, is consistent with
the ESC chars being removed before reaching the screen, which seems to
indicate that the ECSs are being eaten by the Lynx code proper, and not 
by the ncurses with which this version of Lynx was built (ncurses would 
render an ESC as the two chars ^[, according to the docs I have).

This is on the Linux console, kernel 2.0.36, with Lynx 2.8.1rel2.

-David         address@hidden