[GLLUG] Adventures with Uzbl

[Jeff Lawton]

Thanks Chick for the right up. I will give it a go on next time I am 
turning to a CLI browser.

On 01/03/2012 10:08 PM, Chick Tower wrote:
> 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.

-- 
Jeff Lawton
Ideal Solution, LLC
517-485-2650 ext 220
jeff at idealso.com
http://www.idealso.com