Meet Uzbl — a Web Browser With the Unix Philosophy

DigDuality writes "Dieter@be over at Arch Linux forums, a release engineer for Arch Linux, got inspired by this post. The idea? To create a browser based on the Unix philosophy: 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well, programs that work well together, programs to handle text streams because that is a universal interface,' among other points. The result? A fast, low-resource browser named Uzbl, based on WebKit, which passes the Acid3 Test with a perfect score. The browser is controlled (by default) by vim-like keybindings, not too dissimilar to vimperator for Firefox. Things like URL changing, loading/saving of bookmarks, saving history, and downloads are handled through external scripts that you write (though the Uzbl software does come with some nice scripts for you to use). It fits great in a tiling window manager and plays extremely well with dmenu. The learning curve is a bit steep, but once you get used to it, it's smooth sailing. Not bad for alpha software. Though built for Arch, it has been reported to work on Ubuntu."

Comments

And the UNIX philosophy is...

[wampus]

Worse is better!

Re:And the UNIX philosophy is...

[Brian Gordon]

Even if few people use it, the world's always better when someone writes an interesting app.

Re:vi?

[clang_jangle]

Oh wow, now I've gone and looked at it and it's really cool! It's a collection of python scripts, so it should run on pretty much anything. And yes, keybndings (and most everything else) are easily reconfigured -- if you know python.

Re:But that's a faulty comparison

[Trepidity]

I challenged him to show me something it could do that UltraEdit couldn't.

How about use it to edit a remote file over ssh, from an Android phone? Or do complex things without using the damn mouse? Or write macros in a usable macro language?

More generally, with commonly used software, some of us just don't care about the learning curve. With the tools I use daily, I don't even remember what the first hour of using them was like, because it was so many thousands of hours ago. I even find it interesting to learn about new ways of doing things, so I don't resent an hour or two of getting up to speed, even if I don't end up using the tool. I could see if I had to learn a new tool an hour before a deadline I'd be annoyed, but the simple solution to that is not to schedule your new-tool experimentation an hour before a deadline. =]