kovidgoyal/vise

Vise

A keyboard driven browser with tabs in a tree. Uses an embedded chromium instance (via QtWebEngine) for the actual rendering. I got tired of depending on fragile, cobbled together, poorly integrated solutions based on mainstream browsers and extensions. Mainstream browsers are designed for lowest common denominator usage, that is no longer good enough.

Features

Here is a list of features that I intend this browser to have

• Easy navigation through history by substring matching using the keyboard

• A tabbed tree browser with drag and drop to group as well as quick access via keystrokes to individual tabs

• The UI is modal, like vim, which means all major UI functions can be quickly and easily accessed via single key strokes.

• Integrated password management with a simple (encrypted) filesystem based storage for passwords. That makes it easy to sync between computers using standard file syncing tools.

• Text based configuration files for easy reproducability and syncing of settings

Status

vise is fully functional, and I use it as my daily browser. While the code in vise is fully cross-platform, currently it is only tested on linux, as I don't have the time/interest to test on other platforms. If you want to install vise for yourself on linux, you will need the dependencies listed in the dependencies.txt file and then checkout this repository (I assume below that it is checked out into the folder ~/work/vise). Run:

rapydscript --js-version 6 --cache-dir ~/work/vise/.build-cache ~/work/vise/client/main.pyj > ~/work/vise/resources/vise-client.js

to build the client side JS vise uses. Once that is done, you can run vise straight out of the source code folder, like this:

python3 ~/work/vise

Ad blocking

While it was originally my plan to add integrated ad-blocking to vise, I decided against it, since a better solution is to use either a system-wide (or better network-wide) hosts blacklist, for example: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts or use a system-wide privacy enabled proxy, such a privoxy. These solutions have the advantage of working across all applications, not just the browser.