Lynx Web Browser on Win7 (Updated)

This post is a couple years old still getting lots of hits. I now recommend you move the installation within your own Documents folder and work from there. You’ll have to change the paths below to match that, but you’ll find it less heartache in the long run.

Running Win7-x64 has lots of advantages, but I find much of my favorite software is playing catch-up. In the case of the Lynx text-mode browser, it gets pretty dicey.

The work-arounds depend on how you use it. The latest packages available in a convenient format from Invisible Island (2.8.7 and 2.8.8) won’t work for me on Win7. I’m not sure of all the details, but on many sites Lynx will get an error about reading the compressed file. Even if you run in circles making sure you have gzip and bzip2 in your PATH statement, Lynx won’t find them and won’t unzip any webpages fetched in compressed format.

However, the slightly older 2.8.5 release from CSANT doesn’t present the compression issue. Click the link labeled “Lynx 2.8.5rel.1 installer (1.68MB)” and download. I chose to install it in “Program Files\Lynx” instead of the default “Program Files (x64)\lynx”. During installation you have a chance to get a desktop icon, which I recommend. It is linked to a batch file which needs significant editing over what works in XP. Mine looks like this:

@ECHO OFF
@rem command /C
set term=vt100
set home="C:\Program Files\Lynx"
set temp=Program Files\Lynx\tmp
set lynx_cfg=C:\Program Files\Lynx\lynx.cfg
set lynx_lss=C:\Program Files\Lynx\lynx.lss
"C:\Program Files\Lynx\lynx.exe" -center %1 %2 %3 %4 %5

Parsing that, we note Win7 in the commandline environment doesn’t recognize the ‘command’ line, so we ‘rem’ (remove) it out. Setting the “home” parameter, simply use the location where you installed it; I had to use quotation marks to get it read as all one item. The next item doesn’t need the leading ‘C:\’. But the next two parameters do. I prefer to use ‘lynx.lss’ with a few modifications to suit me. There are several color schemes pre-packaged and you can try them to see what you prefer.

The ‘lynx.cfg’ file I edited somewhat because I don’t like webpage paragraph lines justified in a square block (‘JUSTIFY:FALSE’); I prefer ragged right edges with standard spacing between words. I also changed my STARTFILE to a bookmarks file I made up and use with all my browsers as the page loaded at startup — ‘STARTFILE:file://localhost/~/bookmarks.html’ which tells it to look in my Documents folder for ‘bookmarks.html’. Also, I don’t like the double status line in the bottom of the window, so I set the file to load in advanced user mode (‘DEFAULT_USER_MODE:ADVANCED’) which shows where the link points. You’ll also notice there is a line regarding rejecting cookie domains, and you can add to it if you know enough advertiser domains. Take your time editing this file, and make sure everything is set to your preferences. I left most of the defaults alone. If you prefer to make it simple, copy the ‘lynx.cfg’ to your Documents folder and rename it ‘lynx.rc’, then edit it all you like.

The last line in my batch file requires putting the full path in quotes, but the ‘-center’ switch must be outside them. What this does is reduce the number of times you’ll find webpage paragraphs centered for no apparent reason. Mostly this has to do with Lynx’s habit of rendering what it reads as table data centered by default.

Finally, I modified the icon properties on my desktop. I prefer to view the window with 10×18 font, and laid out 80×50. There are plenty of other tricks I don’t know about, but perhaps I’ve pointed out some you can use. I’m hoping soon the developers will find a way to compile future versions of Lynx specifically for Win7.