LYNX(l)

NAME
lynx - a general purpose distributed information browser for the World Wide Web

SYNOPSIS
Lynx [options] [path or URL]

use "lynx -help" to display a complete list of current options.

DESCRIPTION
Lynx is a general-purpose distributed information browser and is part of the World Wide Web project. Lynx was designed to support a Campus Wide Information System (CWIS), but can be used for many other applications.

When it is started, Lynx is given a local path specifying a file containing text to be displayed, or a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that specifies a resource to be displayed (usually the name of a file containing text information), the type of server that will provide the resource, and the Internet address of the system on which the specified server is running. If the URL or path specifies a hypertext file, that file will be a standard ASCII text file in which hypertext links are embedded. The simplest hypertext link is just a URL designating another resource which itself may contain both text and links.

When a hypertext document is being displayed, links appear different from standard text, and users press the up- or down-arrows to "select" a particular link. Selected links show up as highlighted text, and users press Return or right arrow when a link is highlighted to "follow" the selected link. When the link is followed Lynx finds the associated file and displays it on the screen in place of the first file.

Lynx data files can reside on any accessable local file system. (i.e. NFS, AFS, etc.), or on remote servers. Currently supported remote servers are HTTP, Gopher, FTP, NNTP, and WAIS. A single hypertext file may include links pointing to multiple remote servers, so that Lynx provides a truly distributed hypertext system.

Lynx currently understands two hypertext data formats, the Lynx internal hypertext language and HyperText Markup Language (HTML). The perferred language is HTML and support for the Lynx internal language will be terminated in a subsequent release. Documentation regarding the Lynx intenal hypertext language and HTML are available online.

Lynx is available for most flavors of Unix and VMS

This Un*x version of Lynx should work on any system with a reasonable Curses implementation

COMMANDS
Use the cursor control keys to move around in Lynx. The up and down arrows move you from one selected link to another. Use the right arrow (or Return) to follow a link, and use the left arrow to return from a link. The numeric keypad, or the numbers mapped to the keypad keys, can also be used (i.e., 6-right 8-up 9-pgup 3-pgdn)

Other commands include:

m   Return to the main menu (the first screen you see when you start Lynx)

+ or Space or PgDn
    Scroll down to the next page

- or b or PgUp
    Scroll up to the previous page

?   Help

q Ctrl-D
    Quit Lynx

Backspace or Delete
    Display a list of links that have already been visited. The displayed links may be selected and will result in a new display of the previously displayed information.

/ <string> or s <string>
    Search a selected file for all occurences of the string "string", and display the portion of the file containing that string.

n   Find and display the next occurence of a search string.

c   Send a message to the designated file owner or to the Lynx database administrator

a   Adds the current link to your bookmark page.

g   Allows you to go to a user-specified URL or file.

i   Displays an index of documents or servers.

p   Allows you to print to a local file, mail to an Internet address, print to the screen, or use any commands or printers defined by your system administrator.

'=' Displays an information screen, showing information about the document currently being displayed and the link that is currently selected.

'!' Spawns your default shell.

Backslash
    Displays the HTML source of the document currently on the screen. Pressing '\' again re-renders the document.

NOTES
This is a Beta release of Lynx 2.0 for UN*X/VMS

Thanks to Earl Fogel, Computing Services, University of Saskatchewan, fogel@sask.usask.ca, who wrote the original hytelnet code, and Foteos Macrides <macrides@sci.wfeb.edu> who worked on many parts of the VMS code.

AUTHOR
Lou Montulli, Computing Services, University of Kansas montulli@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu