vimb - the vim like browser

Vimb is a fast and lightweight vim like web browser based on the webkit web browser engine and the GTK toolkit. Vimb is modal like the great vim editor and also easily configurable during runtime. Vimb is mostly keyboard driven and does not distract you from your daily work.

If your are familiar with vim or have some experience with pentadactyl the use of vimb would be a breeze, if not we missed our target.

latest features

New setting status-bar-show-settingsThis allows to enable visualization of some runtime settings. Format of this and the settings to show are configured in src/config.h on compilation time.New setting notificationThese new settings allow to control the website access to the notification API.Add $VIMB_SELECTION when :shellcmd is run.This variable is set to the current selected text whenever a :shellcmd is executed.

Vimb 3.6.0 released

New option --cmd, -CAllow to give ex commands on startup that are give to new spawned child instances too.

More about latest changes can be found in the CHANGELOG.md.

screenshots

There isn’t really much to see for a browser that is controlled via keyboard. But following images may give a impression of they way vimb works.

features

• it’s modal like Vim
• Vim like keybindings - assignable for each browser mode
• nearly every configuration can be changed at runtime with Vim like set syntax
• history for ex commands, search queries, URLs
• completions for: commands, URLs, bookmarked URLs, variable names of settings, search-queries
• hinting - marks links, form fields and other clickable elements to be clicked, opened or inspected
• SSL validation against ca-certificate file
• user defined URL-shortcuts with placeholders
• read it later queue to collect URIs for later use
• multiple yank/paste registers
• Vim like autocmd - execute commands automatically after an event on specific URIs

packages

download

• You can get vimb from github by following command.

  git clone git://github.com/fanglingsu/vimb.git
  

• Or you can download actual source as tar.gz or as zip or get one of the releases.

dependencies

• webkit2gtk-4.0 >= 2.8.x

install

Edit config.mk to match your local setup. You might need to do this if you use another compiler, like tcc. Most people, however, will almost never need to do this on systems like Ubuntu or Debian.

Edit src/config.h to match your personal preferences, like changing the characters used in the loading bar, or the font.

The default Makefile will not overwrite your customised config.h with the contents of config.def.h, even if it was updated in the latest git pull. Therefore, you should always compare your customised config.h with config.def.h and make sure you include any changes to the latter in your config.h.

Run the following commands to compile and install Vimb (if necessary, the last one as root). V=1 enables verbose output for those that are interested to see full compiler option lines.

make V=1
make install

If you wish to install with other PREFIX note that this option must be given for both steps the compile step as well as the install step.

make PREFIX="/usr"
make PREFIX="/usr" DESTDIR="/home/user" install

To run vimb without installation for testing it out use the ‘runsandbox’ make target.

make runsandbox

contribute

If you find a misbehaviour or have feature requests use the issue tracker provided by github or via mailing list (list archive).

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