LWN: Comments on "Uzbl: a browser following the UNIX philosophy"

Uzbl: a browser following the UNIX philosophy

mathstuf — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:12:00 +0000

For uzbl at least, I've gathered quite a few nifty shortcuts[1] (the most common as plain bindings, the less used ones with a leading '\').

[1]http://git.benboeckel.net/dotfiles.git/tree/dotfiles/base...

Uzbl: a browser following the UNIX philosophy

dashesy — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:28:18 +0000

Duckduckgo (DDG) has many many !Bangs for all that keywords, !w for Wiki, !g for Google and \ if you are feeling lucky. If you have DDG in your search bar, you can do that in any browser.

Uzbl: a browser following the UNIX philosophy

nix — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:39:01 +0000

You might like 'surfraw'. It's sort of like Mozilla's keywords /
Konqeror's web shortcuts, only from the command line :)

Uzbl: a browser following the UNIX philosophy

dmag — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:39:12 +0000

Prism is a small step in that direction. You can turn off the menubars and make a webpage look like an app. But Prism doesn't play well with UNIX: from the command line, you can start it and stop it, not much else.

Uzbl sounds like you'll be able to do neat things: (haven't looked at it, but here's my imagination:) log your clickstream to STDOUT, filter URLs clicked on with a shell script (ad-block implemented in perl regexes), re-implement greasemonkey with "perl -pe 's/foo/bar/g'", etc.

As an aside: I can't use the web without Mozilla's keywords: "g foo" does a google search for foo, "w foo" does a wikipedia search, "imdb foo" does an IMDB lookup, "to foo" uses google maps to tell me how far a way a city is, etc.)

Uzbl: a browser following the UNIX philosophy

alex — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:07:15 +0000

I wonder how it differs from Mozilla's Prism (rendering engine aside). It sounds like the two might accomplish similar goals.

Uzbl: a browser following the UNIX philosophy

sstein — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:25:27 +0000

There is a good Firefox extension called vimperator, which gives you a vim-like interface to Firefox. You can define keybindings and hide all menus. Might be an alternative if you don't want to switch your browser, but just become a little bit more efficient in using it.

http://vimperator.org/trac/wiki/Vimperator

Uzbl: a browser following the UNIX philosophy

flewellyn — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:42:43 +0000

Intriguing idea. I like the concept. I may give it a try when they polish it up a bit more and provide more "usable" defaults.

Uzbl: a browser following the UNIX philosophy

jlokier — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:07:15 +0000

While it might not replace Firefox as a general purpose browser (for me), it looks absolutely brilliant as an alternative to Gtk/QT for writing GUI applications - using a web front end that runs locally in a self-contained window.

Truth about extensions

pspinler — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:24:59 +0000

Some considerable truth about being addicted to extensions. I'm not moving off firefox until I can replicate the functionality of adblock + noscript + betterprivacy + imglikeopera. Also, using window managers for tabbed browsing may not be as easily accomplished on a non-linux system, like my main Mac desktop.

That said, it sounds like adding adblock/noscript like content filters are just a matter of programming.

-- Pat

Uzbl: a browser following the UNIX philosophy

mjthayer — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:18:08 +0000

The idea sounds very good - componentise the browser so that you can work on each bit individually and mix and match. But that is actually what webkit did I beleive, and uzbl looks essentially like a webkit wrapper. Not sure how well the unix idea of text streams in and out applies to GUI components though. I think that other patterns may be needed here, like the gedit plugin model. Still, I would love to see other big GUI things - specifically an office suite - which were entirely based on small clean components.

Uzbl: a browser following the UNIX philosophy

felixfix — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:48:24 +0000

I'll be watching this, sounds promising. It sends tingly thoughts in and out of my brain.