Uzbl – Web interface tools which adhere to the Unix philosophy | Hacker News Reader

Uzbl – Web interface tools which adhere to the Unix philosophy

uzbl.org

103 pointsjavanix50 comments

> Any program can only be really useful if it complies with the Unix philosophy.

False! Software can be really useful without being modular and readily composable.

But I enjoy the premise of what Uzbl is aiming to solve. It would certainly make for a richer array of web-related software components, with plenty of uses beyond just web browsers.

I think the contention comes when you get down to brass tacks; note the author emphasizes "really useful", and hence probably means, sure, your software might be "useful", but it's not useful to the extant that a program you can insert into a pipeline or script is.

sure, many unix programs might be useful, but without good UX design, remain horrible to use (see: tar). taking the unix philosophy as gospel is myopic; computer programs are meant to be used by people, and a program can only be useful if it's well-designed for use by people.

However, tar is a command-line program, and thus easy to interface with.

Thus, I recommend `atool`, which use tar, unzip, unrar, ... but wraps it all in a very good UX not depending on the archive type.

    aunpack my_archive.zip
    aunpack my_archive.rar
    aunpack my_archive.bzip
    ...

It also makes the right choice when several files not under a directory are in the archive (create a new directory and place files inside), when the archive contains a single file (just place the file in the current directory), and when a clash of names can occur with a file/directory already present in your cwd (unpacks in a directory named 'Unpack-XYZ')

Unix is extremely well-designed for use by people. Unix people.

Unless you invert the relationship and install biztalk which we dub in the office "Unix done wrong". Both are useful. One is painful :)

It would have been really true if it had said, > "Any program can be really useful if it complies with the Unix philosophy." (sans "only").

i can't really use this project now that my main os is osx(i frequently boot from my ssd with archlinux on the mba), but

i absolutely love this project. it's amazing,

the only thing i'm a little sad about is that i never wrote the pass plugin i wanted for password store [1]. but hey you can still write one

the main author moved, but there are fairly active forks[2].

the amazing thing about this is that you can write plugins in any scripting language you want. you can pretty much hook it's basically a mighty scriptable version of webkit.

here are a bunch of scripts you can use to extend it with [3]

on a sidenote, a completely different, but also interesting approach are conkeror [4] and luakit [5]. though luakit seems abandoned too. luakit is kind of a lua webkit browser framework with sane vi like defaults. conkeror is an emacs for xulrunner, however keep in mind that since firefox is taking over the role of xulrunner you might not really need xulrunner at all.

[1] http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/

[2] https://github.com/mathstuf/uzbl/tree/next

[3] http://www.uzbl.org/wiki/scripts

[4] http://conkeror.org/#Installation_and_Startup

[5] http://mason-larobina.github.io/luakit/

Its pretty kludgy, but X forwarding to a local VM that runs it is actually usable.

It's also available through MacPorts apparently, though I haven't had a chance to try it.

We've been using Uzbl in Screenly (http://www.screenlyapp.com/) for some time now and it works really well.

For anyone wondering, uzbl stands for “usable”.

Thanks! As a non-native speaker I thought it was as arbitrary as xkcd.

Another browser with a similar approach: http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/

A few others (all based on webkit, like uzbl):

http://surf.suckless.org/

http://mason-larobina.github.io/luakit/

https://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/

Thanks for the rename, whoever did that. Couldn't figure out how to properly phrase it without being super link-baity.

Has anybody looked into the application of this for headless acceptance tests on web apps?

Does Mozilla explore similar architecture with their experimental Servo project?

Servo is a rendering engine (think WebKit), not a browser. So maybe you'll get an uzbl based on Servo one day, just like you may get a Servo-based Firefox, or it may remain at the state of a research project, with lessons incorporated back into Gecko.

[related] ii irc client where everything is a file http://erthalion.github.io/2014/02/16/ii/

Development seems to have mostly dropped off in the past year, fwiw: https://github.com/Dieterbe/uzbl

Hey, it's in Arch community repository! Happy day.

    sudo pacman -S uzbl-tabbed

The dev is an arch user. He used to hang out on irc a few years back. I remember when he was first writing the app and asking users for feedback.

Thanks for mentioning this. I never thought to even search because often something like this is in AUR, which I never bother with. I will definitely take it for a spin now.

why wouldn't you "bother" with AUR. What stops you?

I don't run software from AUR on my systems. I consider the packages unstable. It's just a personal rule of mine, I'm sure there are some stable, quality packages in there.

If a package is stable or not has nothing to do with AUR.

I used it for years for CLI apps like ranger and dmenu that eventually moved into the the community repo.

Only way (Besides compiling it yourself) to get many programs to work like CrashPlan.

I tried out uzbl a few months ago. It works very well for tiling WMs, actually. I should consider using it more often.

I tried it a few years ago. I think it's conceptually interesting, but I realized that I had no need, on a day to day basis, to combine in arbitrary ways the various pieces which make a full browser experience. I'm content with Firefox + Pentadactyl, but I'm glad uzbl exists.

Last I checked, Pentadactyl is dead. I've moved back to Vimperator.

https://code.google.com/p/dactyl/source/browse#hg%2Fcommon%2...

i don't know where you got the impression. if anything it's the other way round, no?

When I went to install Pentadactyl from the Firefox addons site, it told me that Pentadactyl wasn't compatible with my (the latest) version of Firefox, 27.0.

The developer(s) are slow about incrementing the allowed versions. Literally all you have to do to make it work (usually) is vim ~/.mozilla/firefox/yourprofile/extensions/whatever.xpi, then type /install.rdf, hit enter twice, edit <em:maxVersion>n</em:maxVersion> to be +1, then hit :x and you're done.

Of course this requires that you have it installed beforehand, otherwise just download the files manually and edit install.rdf before installing it.

> The developer(s) are slow about incrementing the allowed versions.

> Literally all you have to do to make it work (usually) is vim ~/.mozilla/firefox/yourprofile/extensions/whatever.xpi, then type /install.rdf, hit enter twice, edit <em:maxVersion>n</em:maxVersion> to be +1, then hit :x and you're done.

Can you (or anyone else) explain why the developers hesitate to fix this problem officially? Like you said, it is rather simple to fix.

Even though most of us on HN are able to apply the fix ourselves, integrating the fix to the official pentadactyl extension would save time for everyone that wants to try or install pentadactyl.

Sorry I don't know why this happens, but as far as I can tell they do increment the nightlies (usually a couple weeks after a new Firefox version). I don't know why the version on the plugins site is so out of date though, you'd have to ask one of the developers (irc.oftc.net #pentadactyl).

Every time I upgrade Firefox I get a notice that Pentadactyl isn't compatible, at which point it asks if I'd like to check for a newer version. Then it searches and installs the latest snapshot and that's it. I've found nothing wrong with the nightly version.

check the latest nightly build or install nightly tester tools

Pentadactyl is still extremely active, they just haven't cut a new release in a while.

> they just haven't cut a new release in a while

Which seems to mean that you can't run the stable version of pentadactyl on Firefox 27 (the current release) [1]. I do understand that it is not equal to being inactive, but at least for me it was one of the reasons why I returned back to vimperator (which has a stable version that works for Firefox 27).

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/

Run a nightly? But yeah, it seems to always take a little while for the Pentadactyl folks to release a stable version.

That sure is understating it. The last release states it's compatible with Firefox 4.0 - 14. Firefox 15 came out August 28, 2012.

Yeah, but there are nightly pentadactyl versions which work perfectly well with the latest stable firefox.

You may be right. I think I must have been running a nightly all this time! But anyway, it works.

Me too, I've been switching back and forth between both. I'd be interested in knowing if Pentadactyl is still running fine on Firefox 27.

Yes I can confirm it works perfectly on 27, I've been using it since I updated.

Use the nightly builds, they are updated daily.

I find all the pie in the sky stuff on the page for this really silly and kind of pointless (for everyday use, at least), tbh, but this was exactly my thought when I read it. I really need a browser that interacts better with i3, because I don't really need tabs when the window manager is doing it for me.

The problem with it is that it doesn't have a good addon community. Things like LastPass, Ghostery, and (good) ad blocking.

I'd love to figure out how to get tmux/screen keybindings for this.

Opening a browser and using it within an existing terminal (without needing the mouse) would be incredibly close to the ideal workflow for me.

This is awesome! Is there a uzbl command to view the page source?

for anyone wondering, uzbl stands for “usable”.

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