Get Lynx for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion
Lynx is a text based command line web browser, it’s relatively popular within unix communities but it also has a variety of general uses too; it’s great if you want to discretely browse the web and read articles at work or school, and developers use lynx frequently to test accessibility and to roughly estimate how spiders or crawlers view a website. Because it only loads text and avoids javascript and images, it’s also lightning fast.
Anyway, after updating to Lion I discovered my previous installation of lynx was not functioning. Thankfully it’s very easy to install a working version with the help of MacPorts.
Installing and Running Lynx in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion
For the purpose of this walkthrough, we’re going to keep requirements to a minimum and install lynx through MacPorts, here’s what you’ll need:
- MacPorts 2.0 – this was recently updated for Lion
- Xcode 4.1 – now freely available to OS X Lion users via the Mac App Store
Assuming you have now installed Xcode 4.1 and MacPorts 2.0, here’s how to install lynx:
sudo port install lynx
MacPorts will then fetch all the required dependencies including ncurses and zlib, and then proceed to install the lynx browser.
Once it’s finished, just type ‘lynx’ at the command line and it’ll launch as expected. You can then hit “G” to go to a URL, or open one directly from the command line.
This opens OSXDaily.com, for example:
lynx osxdaily.com
You then just use the arrow keys and return/enter to navigate around a site.
Lynx is great, enjoy!
And now Pine (or its replacement, Alpine) which I see is still running on my uni server.
Or get it from HomeBrew. This for all the people that hate MacPorts.
[...] was a blast from the past on Tuesday when William Pearson on OS X Daily discussed downloading and using Lynx. For those of us who were here when the internet first became [...]
or you could just use Lynxlet – http://habilis.net/lynxlet/ save you the hassle of xcode and porting