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

Native tab support: Vimb now supports tabs within a single window. Use gt/gT to navigate between tabs, and :tabopen to open URLs in new tabs.
GTK4 and WebKitGTK 6.0: Vimb has been migrated to GTK4 and WebKitGTK 6.0 for improved performance and modern web standards support.
New :quitall command: Close all tabs and quit the browser with a single command.
New setting media: Enable or disable all media support. Useful on systems where GStreamer is not fully configured.

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
native tab support within a single window
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

Arch Linux: community/vimb, aur/vimb-git, aur/vimb-gtk2
Fedora: fedora/vimb
Gentoo: gentoo-git, gentoo
openSUSE: network/vimb
pkgsrc: pkgsrc/www/vimb, pkgsrc/wip/vimb-git
Slackware: slackbuild/vimb

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

gtk+-4.0
webkit2gtk-6.0
gst-libav, gst-plugins-good (optional, for media decoding among other things)

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).