Lynxlet Editor's Review

Lynxlet is an application that allows you to launch the text Web browser Lynx in a Terminal window.

This application is a Termlet. A Termlet is an application that is designed to make a Terminal based program to be a little bit easier to use.

Lynxlet is a simple low bandwidth Web browser. It loads only the text and it doesn't care about the W3C standards because it doesn't have the support for CSS or complicated page layouts.

With this program you can do minimal browsing tasks by using only the Terminal. The interface is poor but this is the way how operating systems like Linux started to use the browsing.

I managed to do tasks like downloading a file or posting a new entry on my blog by using only this browser. For a text based application it does a lot of things.

Pluses: it uses very low resources and bandwidth.

Drawbacks / flaws: it works only in text mode, minimal support for JavaScript.

In conclusion: is a good Web browser for minimal tasks and if you are an old school user then you might give it a try. It is also very good for testing the way how a crawling bot views the pages. The alternative to this Termlet application is to actually install Lynx with a package manager such as MacPorts or Fink.

version reviewed: 0.6.0