Gmail and Lynx

Not sure why I’m writing about this here, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Gmail works, and works well, in Lynx, the text-only web browser for *nix terminals.

A few days ago there were some network problems on campus (surprise, surprise) and about half of the sites I was going to were not coming up. I desperately needed to check my e-mail and my phone’s battery was dead so I couldn’t do it from there. I didn’t know of any proxies off the top of my head and so I ended up SSH’ing into my webhost and using Lynx to get to Gmail.

Now, I fully realize that Gmail has an HTML-only version that is triggered when JavaScript is disabled (or missing), but for whatever reason I just assumed that the site would somehow break under Lynx. Lucky for me it didn’t break, and honestly, the navigation isn’t that bad in a pinch.