I’m writing this post using Lynx, a command-line, text-only browser, just to see how it works out. I feel cool, thrilled, even daring. Lynx is pretty neat shit, however extremely limited. It manages to handle text, links and frames but can’t handle such things as CSS styling, images and all that newfangled fancy shit.

I first installed it as a fall-back if I should ever have a problem with my X server not starting, which is possible since I like to beta and even alpha test shit. This way, even though I didn’t have a GUI desktop environment to launch my usual browser of choice, I could still boot to just a command-line and hit the support forums for assistance using Lynx.

After a bit of tooling around in the options, I configured Vim to run as my default text editor within Lynx, so in an instance where I would need to enter text (like for this blog post), I can launch Vim and start typing away. Vim is a command-line text editor that I’m sorta-kinda-almost comfortable with. It’s one of those editors that at first glance looks ridiculously difficult to handle, but the more you use, the easier it becomes and if you have the balls, you learn the myriad assortment of commands and eventually become the ultimate text wrangling master. You also never get laid again, ever. A geek milestone that I’m not ashamed to aspire to.

Now that I’ve proved to myself that I can effectively post to my blog with a command-line browser, the likelihood that I’ll do so again is pretty much nil. Yeah, it’s cool, old-school shit, but I do prefer the glittery trappings of the WordPress GUI. Still, I think Lynx is a must-have install for situations like I mentioned above when all hell breaks loose and your GUI has shit the bed and died. It’s also a great barometer of how well put together your website is. Fire up Lynx and check out what your site looks like. Like I said before, CSS styling and graphics will not be displayed, but if you’ve laid things out properly, you’ll see a sane and coherent text-only version of your website. If shit’s all jumbled with stuff that’s supposed to be at the bottom running at the top, then perhaps some redesigning is in order.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 12:15 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.