I love lynx. I love browsing without tabs. Call me a luddite, but I only use a modern browser if I have to. Which is about twice a day, for a few minutes at most.
There's one thing I really really hate about lynx, though. It's not immediately apparent how to customize lynx's behavior when it comes to filetypes.
If I encounter a .pdf file, it downloads it, then dutifully asks me if I'd like to save it to disk. Thanks, lynx. It's like you read my mind or something.
If I encounter a .torrent file, lynx downloads it, then opens it with transmission-gtk.
Uh… no, lynx. I would have either preferred transmission-cli or just having the torrent file.
If I try to open a magnet URL, lynx doesn't know what to do with it. (Psst! transmission-cli, lynx!
But the worst is when I download .ogg, because lynx assumes that I want to play it with VLC in the TTY using caca to render the video as ASCII.
Bad lynx!
How do I whip lynx into shape? How do I customize this behavior? Editing /etc/lynx/lynx.cfg does not seem to do the trick.
Best Answer
Lynx does the standard thing (unlike Firefox and Chrome) and uses the system's mailcap database. The system mailcap is in
/etc/mailcap, and the per-user file is~/.mailcap. Add entries like