Re: [Lynx-dev] Trying out Lynx; pages difficult to read

[Stefan Caunter]

On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 10:59 AM, Alpheus Madsen
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Dear Lynx Development Group,
>
> I was trying Lynx today to see if it could be a practical alternative to
> Firefox.  I tried going to "www.google.com"...but I found the page difficult
> to navigate, and the page difficult to read.
> This has caused me to wonder:  would it be possible to fix these problems?

There are a number of ways to customize lynx so you get a result you like.
Use the options page. Type the letter 'o'. Adjust and save.
Edit /usr/local/etc/lynx.cfg if you have permission.
Use command line options; type 'man lynx' to see them.

> With regards to the "difficulty to read" problem, I think it's because a lot
> of Google's formatting, as simple and stark as it is, is lost, making it
> difficult to see where one search result ends and the other begins.  This
> makes me wonder if having a "Render HTML as ReStructuredText" or ASCII-Doc,
> or even a variant of Markdown, would be highly useful.  Apparently there's a
> GPL project called "Pandoc" (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) that would
> be able to handle this, or at least, serve as an example of how it could be
> done.

Learn how to use the lynx browser on your system. You can make it
extremely readable and fast, if you take the time.

> My second issue--navigability--is probably a greater challenge.  Tabbing
> from link to link is rather painful, especially even when even a page as
> simple as Google's now has a lot of links!

If you are used to vi or emacs, turn those key bindings on, and enable
text field activation.

And it doesn't help that SSH and
> PuTTY don't always play nice with the mouse.  One idea that came to mind
> would be to divide the screen into 10x10 character squares; then arrow keys
> can go from square to square, and shift+arrow_key could navigate within the
> square.

I understand lynx works with a mouse, (I do this on win32), but again,
it probably requires customization.

> I hope you will find these ideas at least somewhat useful.  In any case,
> even if Lynx is somewhat difficult for me to use, I'm glad it's available if
> the time comes when I need to use it!

Perfectly reasonable and understandable (sounds like a new car driver
asking for spherical wheels and a z-axis of movement) ;)

>
> Sincerely,
> Alpheus Madsen.
>
>
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