minimalist browsers seem to go hand-in-hand with tiling window managers. They are typically lightweight (memory wise), allow keyboard control, maximize viewing real estate by hiding the ubiquitous URL bar and other menu/bookmark bars, and are highly configurable.
vimb came under my radar by happenstance. Up until now, luakit had been my go-to browser since circa 2010. Visually and even operationally, many browsers mimicked luakit, written in various dialects, of which, I have used dwb, surf, hbro, jumanji, uzbl, and most recently, qutebrowser. Some required customization via source language coding in C, Lua, Python, Haskell or shell programming. Others utilized extensive configuration files.
The recent announcement of qutebrowser stirred interest in checking out the web browser landscape. Luakit development has been dormant for a number of years and qutebrowser looked fresh. For a version 0.x release, qutebrowser is remarkably stable. But it still lacks, at this juncture, a lot of features important to me—bookmarks and history recording/searching for one—and the QT5 Webkit which it is based on is still somewhat buggy.
That’s when vimb caught my eye. Inspired by Vimprobable, a browser that takes a modal approach similar to the vim editor, vimb seemed like it could be the upgrade ticket and fit more seamlessly into the vim universe I do so much writing in.
first off, my vimb config file maps command mode “:” with the semi-colon (switching the colon and semi-colon)—a convention that is carried over from my vim setup—and a few mappings for opening bookmarks (and bookmarks with a slash tag prefix for quick launches)! Keymaps for tab control (below) and readability Javascripts complete the keybinds..
nnoremap ; :
nnoremap : ;
nnoremap b :open !
nnoremap B :tabopen !
nnoremap d :quit<CR>
nnoremap D :quit!<CR>
nnoremap O :tabopen
nnoremap t :open !/
nnoremap T :tabopen !/
nnoremap gt :sh! xdotool key --window $VIMB_XID ctrl+shift+l<CR><Esc>
nnoremap gT :sh! xdotool key --window $VIMB_XID ctrl+shift+h<CR><Esc>
nnoremap 1gt :sh! xdotool key --window $VIMB_XID ctrl+1<CR><Esc>
nnoremap 2gt :sh! xdotool key --window $VIMB_XID ctrl+2<CR><Esc>
...
nnoremap 9gt :sh! xdotool key --window $VIMB_XID ctrl+9<CR><Esc>
nnoremap 0gt :sh! xdotool key --window $VIMB_XID ctrl+0<CR><Esc>
nnoremap q :eval! simplyread()<CR>
nnoremap Q :eval! readable()<CR>
Bookmark searching is similar to history searching. Type the search terms and press tab to reveal the results of the search. By creating specifically formatted bookmark tags that can guarantee a single search result, oft used web pages can be fetched with just a few keystrokes to pull from the bookmark file..
http://8tracks.com/ 8tracks internet radio | Free music playlists | Best app for music music 8tracks /8t
http://localhost:32400/web/index.html#!/dashboard Plex Media Manager manager media plex server /pl
http://localhost:631/ Home - CUPS 2.0.1 cups printing /cu
http://localhost:8000/tt-rss/#f=-3&c=0 (30068) Tiny Tiny RSS tt-rss ttrss /tt
http://localhost:8080/ Syncthing | luna syncthing /sy
...
https://aur.archlinux.org/ AUR (en) - Home archlinux aur database /au
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox Inbox (419) - sdothum@gmail.com - Gmail gmail /gm
http://songza.com/ Songza - Listen to Music Curated by Music Experts songza music /za
https://www.archlinux.org/news/ Arch Linux - News arch linux news /ar
http://thedarnedestthing.com/the%20darnedest%20thing the darnedest thing the darnedest thing tdt vps /TD
The use of the forward slash “/” for the two letter tag may not be the best tag character to use, but it can be changed at a later date easily enough.
some vimb behaviors and settings are enabled to customize the look and feel of the browser—the way I like it—whose descriptions and many other settings can be found here..
set download-path=/net/downloads/http
set editor-command="gvim -f"
set fontsize=12px
set history-max-items=99999
set input-autohide=true
set input-bg-normal=#464f52
set input-fg-normal=#fdf6e3
set home-page=https://www.archlinux.org/
set smooth-scrolling=true
set spacial-navigation=true
set spell-checking=true
set statusbar=false
set webinspector=true
vimb allows defining search engine associations with simple acronyms after the “:open” and “:tabopen” commands, of which, a few(!) are listed to give an idea of how nimble the browser can become as a tool..
shortcut-default du
shortcut-add ab=https://bbs.archlinux.org/search.php?action=search&author=&forums=&search_in=0&sort_by=0&sort_dir=DESC&show_as=topics&keywords=$0
shortcut-add al=http://www.allmusic.com/search/all/$0
shortcut-add ar=https://duckduckgo.com/?q=arch%20linux%20$0
shortcut-add au=https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&C=0&SeB=nd&outdated=&SB=n&SO=a&PP=50&do_Search=Go&K=$0
shortcut-add aw=https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=$0
shortcut-add di=http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/$0
shortcut-add du=https://duckduckgo.com/?q=$0&ia=images
shortcut-add gi=https://github.com/search?q=$0
shortcut-add go=https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=$0
...
shortcut-add ha=http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=$0
shortcut-add im=http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=$0
shortcut-add ja=http://www.jango.com/music/$0
shortcut-add mr=http://www.mrqe.com/search?q=$0
shortcut-add re=https://duckduckgo.com/?q=review%20$0
shortcut-add ro=http://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/?search=$0
shortcut-add wi=http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=$0
shortcut-add wo=http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=$0
shortcut-add yo=http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=$0
shortcut-add za=http://songza.com/search/?q=$0
The acronyms—I happen to like two letter assignments— followed by any number of search terms couldn’t be any easier!
tabs are not natively built into vimb which may seem like a huge drawback—though, there are instances in which such behaviour may be preferable for security. A URL :tabopen or passed to vimb or link Control-clicked will, by default, open a new instance (window) of vimb.
But there are means to emulate the browser tabs common to other browsers and to open URLs in a common vimb window. This requires tabbed and sockets..
#!/bin/sh
histfile=~/.config/vimb/history
histsize=1000
function prune_history() {
work=$(mktemp)
[[ -f $histfile.vimb ]] || touch $histfile.vimb
cat $histfile.vimb $histfile > $work
head -$(( $(cat $work | wc -l) - $histsize )) $work > $histfile.vimb
tail -$histsize $work > $histfile
}
if xdotool search -classname 'VimbT'; then
echo “;tabopen $@<CR>” | socat - unix-connect:$(grep ‘socket’ /tmp/vimb.socket)
else
[[ $(hostname) = luna ]] && prune_history
tabbed -f -n ‘VimbT’ -ps+1 -t ‘#B3431E’ -T ‘#FFFFFF’ -u ‘#464F52’ -U ‘#AAAAAA’ /usr/bin/vimb –socket –dump –embed > /tmp/vimb.socket
fi
There is a lot going on here. First, prune_history was written to keep the history available to the browser to a reasonable size. This is done purely for performance reasons—an excessively large history file slows down vimb history searches and quiting, something I discovered after porting over my 30K luakit history to vimb! My vimb configuration is shared across computers via syncthing so only the primary workstation triggers pruning the history. dmenu is used to access the older (pruned) history records (see below).
On first launch, the history is pruned and tabbed invokes vimb which dumps the socket information for persistent access. Subsequent calls to vimb connect to vimb via its socket.
Note: that the URL command passed to vimb is with a (semi-colon) ;tabopen (not a colon)! This is because of the colon and semi-colon keybinds above which swap the colon and semi-colon keys!
Now, all external calls to vimb from any source, via the vimb wrapper, will open the URL in a new tab! Unlike most browsers which typically divide the tab space available by the number of opened tabs until the tabs themselves become unusably truncated, tabbed maintains a minimum tab width with automatic scroll indicators, maximizing the active tab width where possible—quite novel and effective!
vimb loads the scripts.js file on every page load. This allows inserting userscripts to be triggered on page events—I haven’t tried this myself but it should be possible for the available events that vimb is able to trap—and mapping user defined actions to keys.
Any number of functions can be placed in the scripts.js file for reference in the vimb config file. Distraction free scripts are defined in the config keymaps above.
dmenu is used to allow searching the entire browser history (current plus pruned) which, combined with the socket connection, provides seamless history reference..
#!/bin/sh
filter='ERROR:|localhost|luakit:|Page not found|[Ss]earch'
case $BROWSER in
luakit) sqldb=~/.local/share/luakit/history.db
query=”select datetime(last_visit,’unixepoch’), title, uri from history order by last_visit DESC;”
uri=$(echo “$query”
| sqlite3 $sqldb
| egrep -v “$filter”
| sed ‘s/[|]/ :: /g’
| $(dlist) -p ‘Web History:’
| sed -r ‘s/.* :: .* :: (.)/\1/’)
;;
vimb|) histfile=~/.config/vimb/history
uri=$(tac $histfile $histfile.vimb
| egrep -v “$filter”
| sed “s/\t/ :: /g”
| $(dlist) -p ‘Web History:’
| sed -r ‘s/(.) :: ./\1/’)
;;
esac
[[ $uri ]] && dbrowser "$uri"
The dbrowser script allows opening the selected URL with any browser which is useful for the rare web site not rendered properly by WebKitGTK.
last, but not least, the shell environment should set the default browser and path (if not already set) it can be found in..
export BROWSER=vimb
export PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH
and for URxvt terminal users, URLs on the console screen can be opened with..
URxvt*perl-ext-common: default,matcher
URxvt*url-launcher: vimb
vimb: similar in many ways to luakit and other minimalistic browsers I use and difficult to differentiate by look between them. One of the great features I find with vimb (and surf), is that refreshing a page does not “home” the web page which is extremely useful for tweaking style sheets or previewing web content changes—which I do a lot.
For all its nimbleness, it is not without its “quirks”, if they can be called that. For instance, because “tabs” are essentially overlapped instances of vimb occupying a single window, history undo can seem limited—only the last page closed is “remembered”, not all closed “tabs”, nor is the go back/forward history for that restored page available. It can be a bit disorienting if comprehensive history undo is something relied upon extensively in your browser workflow—though, every web page visited can be found in vimb’s history search. It may become more intuitive and less unsettling in time—and less problematic when I am just surfing and not tinkering with vimb itself.
Qutebrowser (and lispkit) remains on the horizon. But vimb with its “vim-ness” in configuration and use make it very powerful and familiar—and the browser I currently find myself exploring and using.