[GLLUG] Adventures with Uzbl

[Chick Tower]

I asked about the web browser Uzbl a while ago.  Stan suggested I try it 
and write about it, so here is my initial report.

I tried uzbl pretty much for the first time today.  I'm running it on 
Arch Linux on a really old (> 10yrs) laptop that Lee Putnam gave me a 
few years ago that is still running just fine.  I had started it up 
before, but not gone beyond the home page except to view the Uzbl 
keystrokes "cheat sheet".  That is a very necessary first step, as 
you'll see later.  You can read more about Uzbl at http://www.uzbl.org, 
I believe.

When you start Uzbl, you see a web page much as you would expect to with 
any other GUI browser, such as Firefox or Konqueror.  However, you soon 
notice there is no navigation bar, or icons to select.  It's not too 
obvious at first, but there's a line of text at the very bottom of the 
browser window, and that's where you tell it what to do.  Uzbl is 
designed to operate according to the Unix philosophy of do one thing 
well, so the basic Uzbl doesn't do much but display HTML.  It uses 
Webkit, just as Midori and, I believe, Safari do, but you operate it 
more like a text web browser like lynx or w3m.  That's why you need the 
cheat sheet, so you have some introduction to the commands you can 
issue.  They're usually a one-character command, just like in vi/vim, 
but you can modify them to be whatever you want.  In fact, the default 
layout is similar to vi/vim, using h, j, k, and l to scroll the window 
and <Ctrl>-f and <Ctrl>-b to move a page at a time.  You also get scroll 
bars so you can move around via the mouse.  Also like vi/vim, just to 
drive the rest of you nuts, it has command mode and input mode, and you 
can use i and <Esc> to start and end input mode.  To make changes to 
Uzbl's behavior, there's no Preferences item in the (non-existent) menu 
to allow you to change things; you have to edit the configuration file, 
which is plain text and well-commented.  Thinking of Uzbl as a hybrid of 
vim and Firefox won't be far wrong.

Anyway, as I said, today wasn't the first time I had run it, but it 
would be the first time I really tried it out.  I had an xterm window 
open (to display the cheat sheet) and fired up Uzbl.  It loaded its home 
page just fine.  It loaded up Slashdot when I directed it there.  That's 
as far as I got, though.  My hard drive was constantly running (or so 
the little light said) and responses to the mouse were delayed by 
minutes.  I think X and Uzbl completely ignored the keyboard.  I managed 
to get the first window of the Fluxbox menu displayed, but I couldn't 
control the mouse enough to make any selections, and the menu window 
stayed on the screen for many minutes.  <Ctrl>-<Alt>-<Bksp> failed to 
kill X.  I wanted to get to xterm to run top and see what was consuming 
so many of the PC's resources, but I couldn't even do that.  I ended up 
turning off the machine.

After rebooting, I was a bit leery to try Uzbl again.  I fooled around 
with Midori instead, which seemed to work better than I thought it did, 
although I didn't run it for long.  I think it somehow gradually runs 
slower on my old PC the longer I run it, which is why I'm looking for a 
faster, light browser.  However, after doing what I had wanted to do at 
the library, I again fired up Uzbl.  It worked fine, although I waited a 
while to revisit Slashdot.  No such problems as before.  So, I don't 
know why it acted the way it did the first time today, especially since 
I hadn't run anything else but xterm before it, and I had two instances 
of xterm running this time.

I should mention that, in Arch, Uzbl comes in three sections -- 
uzbl-core, uzbl-browser, and uzbl-tabbed.  Uzbl is scriptable using 
Python, which is how much of its user actions get done.  The third 
package in Arch allows you to group all the instances of Uzbl into one 
tabbed window, so it's like the tabs in mainstream browsers.  The core 
package pretty much just displays HTML, but without any way to control 
the browser or enter information or URLs.  The second package is the one 
that probably has a bunch of Python scripts to let users actually do 
things.  So if you're going to try installing it, make sure you get more 
than just the core program.

Time will tell if Uzbl meets my needs.  The website does say to treat it 
as alpha software.  I would say that people uncomfortable with using vim 
or emacs in the console would be equally uncomfortable using Uzbl. 
However, if you like the lightweight browsers like Dillo or links, 
you'll probably like Uzbl better.
-- 

                                Chick