luakit- A Minimal Browser that Works

Browsers are one of those software programs I’m always on the lookout for something potentially new and interesting. In particular, I have a soft spot for the minimalistic browsers. The ones that have small executable sizes and are, generally speaking, very quick. In the past I’ve tried uzbl and jumanji, in addition to all of the big boys like firefox, chrome, epiphany, safari and opera.

The problem with the smaller browsers is there always seems to be a page or site that just doesn’t work. Either iti the browser crashed, or something wasn’t supported properly, or the page didn’t render correctly, or the changes were happening to quickly to make it worth the time to customize the browser, only to have everything change and be back at ground zero.

Admittedly, some of that is my fault. That’s the price paid for early adoption.

So when I found luakit, I was intrigued but hesitant. I’m quite familiar with lua and the concept, using lua as a configuration language around a fast, compiled core browsing engine, seemed a good one. I did a little looking around and found pretty overwhelmingly positive reviews. Since luakit was already packaged in the debian system, I decided to give it a go.

And I’m pleasantly surprised to say, I haven’t used any other browser since. First off, it’s very uzbl like, right down to the spartan look of the status bar and command prompt. I don’t mind this at all, since it maximizes the viewing area. It’s highly geared towards keyboard based browsing, including link following. In fact, it’s possible to achieve all browsing without the use of a pointing device. Many standard features are provided like bookmarks, history, tabbed browsing, and quickmarks (basically, like bookmarks except it works with a couple keystrokes).

But what separates it from uzbl is the fact that luakit is tied together by lua. It uses webkit(the browsing library behind safari) and interfaces to gtk widgets for presentation purposes. The result is a browser with a fast, compiled core exposed by bindings via lua. All of the high level functionality is provided by lua code. So if, for instance, I don’t like having a statusbar on the bottom of my screen I can change a couple of lines of code and move the status bar to the top. Or, I can change the way bookmarks are displayed.

What’s nice is, I don’t have to edit esoteric configuration files, or worry about how to make a python module talk to a bash script. Everything is modifiable right in the lua code. What’s more, all of these changes can be accommodated without affecting the main program. A series of configuration files related to windows, key bindings, modes and options are all designed to be user configurable. So modification of actual source code is unnecessary.

There are other nice things about luakit (more on that in a future post), but the best complement I can pay it at this point is it’s the first browser of it’s kind I’ve used where I don’t have to keep going back to a standby. Flash content, ssl, cookies are all handled well enough that they work on all the sites I use frequently without any loss of browsing experience. As I stated earlier, I’ve used it exclusively (on both my 1015PN and my desktop) for several week now. I can’t say that about any other browser I’ve tried. I’ve always ended up back as an opera user.

I mean, let’s face it, tinkering with browser stuff can be fun, but at the end of the day it’s still got to work if I’m going to stick with it. Luakit does just that.