I’ve been spending more and more time in the terminal. Honestly, for most of the things I need, it does the job perfectly well. Sometimes, though, I need to quickly jump online for a quick search, maybe to grab a small code snippet, check a reference for a blog post, or just confirm if a link I’m using still works.
Every now and then I have to leave the terminal and open a browser. And believe me, my browser setup is already chaotic enough.
Chrome isn’t my home anymore
When Google began phasing out Manifest V2 for
The obvious move wasn’t merely swapping browsers, but changing the engine behind them, so I moved to Firefox. Not long after, a draft revision of their terms of service stirred panic: the language was broad enough that users worried Mozilla might share data with “partners”. Mozilla rewrote the clause within days, but the episode left me uneasy. All this enshittification starts with seemingly small changes like these.
Where do we turn in an environment that feels hostile to users, where human attention and data are just products being traded? For me, the answer was to look for alternatives. That’s when I made a small sidestep to LibreWolf, a hardened Firefox fork focused on privacy and fingerprint-resistance.
This solved a big part of the problem. But the bigger issue remains: Big corporations profit from user data while treating users like they don’t matter, even though we’re the ones creating the value. I won’t dive deeper here, I’ve already written about that.
Small searches and the over-complicated web
Over the years, I’ve started to notice something simple but important. We don’t need all this complexity to get things done online. The tools we already have often work just fine, especially when we stop assuming the browser has to be the central part of the experience. The internet wasn’t created to be an ad-delivery machine. It was meant to be a space for sharing knowledge. Today, though, it feels more like a giant system designed to grab your attention and give back as little as possible.
The mountain of trackers I block every day just reinforces this, and the more I see it, the more I realize, this affects everything.
The Lynx in the room
I first heard about Lynx, the text-mode browser, back in my master’s degree. In one of our accessibility classes we were asked to build an accessible webpage. We had total freedom to use any framework or tools we wanted. At the time, I was deep in my React phase, just like everybody else.
Between my lack of time and my focus on getting React SSR working (this was still the class-component era), I made what seemed like an odd choice then but proved the right one:
I built the entire project using just HTML and CSS. Nothing else.
The project wasn’t complicated, just a simple product page. Because the focus was on accessibility, I sprinkled a healthy dose of ARIA attributes throughout to be safe.
When the professor reviewed the projects, many students couldn’t even deliver a working static page. Some didn’t really understand what create-react-app was doing behind the scenes, others weren’t familiar with the core concepts of accessibility. The professor spun up a local web server with all our projects.
Here’s where things got interesting. Using a screen-reader, he began reviewing. Guess which page worked? Mine.
Yes, kids. Sometimes laziness is the right answer.
When the class complained that “this wasn’t a real browser”, the professor calmly opened the terminal and ran Lynx on each project. Same outcome, most failed (Angular went far better than I antecipated, to be fair).
Finally, he opened Chrome, disabled JavaScript, and tried again. Same story, my page worked, while most others didn’t. That was my wake-up call, people with specific needs use the web in ways we don’t always think about. Today I consider myself one of those people, not because of a disability but by choice, for privacy.
From Lynx to Links
That class introduced me to Lynx, and it taught me a lot. But Lynx has its quirks, especially how it colors text based on HTML tags. My terminal is pretty customized these days (Tokyo Night palette, almost full transparency).
What I wanted was a browser that stayed out of the way, one that focused on showing me the page content, not the JavaScript, not the CSS, just the output of the HTML rendered as readable text, ideally with a transparent background so I could still see my waifu wallpaper.
While digging through Lynx customization guides, I stumbled across Links. It’s inspired by Lynx but stripped down, with fewer distractions, and right out of the box it does exactly what I want. Plain text on a transparent background. It’s beautiful.
Now, when I need to do quick research, like checking whether the links I use are still alive (my posts often take weeks or months of reading, searching and checking), I use Links. This also taught me something else. The web is incredibly ephemeral. Pages die all the time, links vanish. I’d never noticed how fragile that part of the internet is.
But that’s a topic for another post. Until then, keep asking questions, keep learning.
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