I try to download a PDF file while browsing with lynx. Unfortunately, lynx tries to open that file immediately using a PDF viewer (evince) though I do not have an X server running.
How can I prevent lynx from doing that and have simply "download" the file instead?
You need to remove the line :
application/pdf; evince %s; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.pdf
from /etc/mailcap. Lynx looks at the mailcap file for what to use when opening non-html.
Lynx uses a combination of the mime-types and mailcap configuration files to determine how to view a file. It does HTML (e.g., text/html) internally, as well as plain text files.
For anything else, it checks first what the mime-type is, and using that, looks in mailcap for the appropriate viewer:
Your personal mime-type and mailcaps are checked first, so you could override the behavior there, but downloading is done only when nothing is chosen. But you could set the global mime-type and mailcap files to something that you control directly. Modifying the system files tends to require intervention when you do upgrades.
You can always simply download whatever a link points to by using d (download) rather than Enter (activate). Even in downloading, you can have choices, which are configurable in lynx.cfg.
To see what keys are bound to different things, use k to show the Current Key Map.
