Uzbl

Any program can only be really useful if it complies with the Unix philosophy. Web browsers (and other tools that work with HTML, such as feed readers) are frequent violators of this principle: They build in way too much things into one (complex) program, dramatically decreasing the options to do things the way you want. They store things in way too fancy formats (XML, RDF, SQLite, etc.) which are hard to store under version control, reuse in other scripts, and so on. "Uzbl" is an umbrella project consisting of different flavors. In the future more things may come, but for now: Uses WebKitGtk+ for rendering and network interaction (libsoup). CSS, JavaScript, and plugin support come for free. Provides interfaces to get data in (commands/configuration) and out (events): stdin/stdout/fifo/Unix sockets. You see a WebKit view and (optionally) a status bar which gets populated externally. No built-in means for URL changing, loading/saving of bookmarks, saving history, keybindings, downloads, etc. Extra functionality: many sample scripts come with it. More are available on the Uzbl wiki or you can write them yourself. Entire configuration/state can be changed at runtime. Uzbl keeps it simple, and puts you in charge. A minimal browser which encompasses a default configuration file, event manager and a selection of scripts which gives a comparable browsing experience to the more common browsers. Spawns one window containing multiple tabs, each tab containing a full embedded uzbl-browser . Ideal as a quick and simple solution to manage multiple uzbl-browser instances without getting lost. Throughout the documentation, when referring to uzbl we mean uzbl-core , unless otherwise specified. The general idea is that Uzbl by default is very bare bones. You can send it commands to update settings and perform actions, through various interfaces. There is a limited, built-in default configuration. It sets a basic status bar, title format, and network connection settings. By default, there are no keybindings defined at all (default keybindings would be counterproductive when you try to customize). For examples of the possibilities what you can do, please see the sample configurations, and wiki page. There is also support for "chained" commands (multiple characters long), and keyworded commands. Also you can trigger incremental matching on commands and variables after pressing return. See the sample configuration file for more information. FIFO & socket files: If enabled by setting their paths through one of the above means, you can have socket and FIFO files available which are very useful to control uzbl using external programs. The advantage of the FIFO is you can write directly to it, but it's half duplex only ( uzbl cannot send a response to you). The socket is full duplex but a socket-compatible wrapper such as socat is needed to work with it. For example: WebKit2 changes many things compared to WebKit1, some of which impact uzbl greatly. This version of uzbl only supports WebKit1 while older version tried to support both at the same time. Uzbl will read commands via standard input, named FIFO pipe (once fifo dir is set) and Unix socket (once socket dir is set). For convenience, uzbl can also be instructed to read commands from a file on startup by using the --config option. Indeed, the config file is nothing more than a list of commands with support for comments (using the character). Each command starts with the name of a command or a uzbl variable that expands to it. A command is terminated by a newline. Empty lines and lines that start with the hash sign (ignoring leading whitespace) are ignored by the parser. Command names are always written in lowercase. means that the first argument is split off used as a key and the remaining string is used verbatim. The command example2 key many args would have key as KEY and many args as VALUE . back [N] Navigate to the Nth (default: 1) previous URI in the instance history. forward [