13 ms·

Show HN: Nyxt Browser 2.0.0

359 points by jmercouris 5y ago

jmercouris 5y ago
If you have any questions, I would be glad to answer them :-) You can also check out our FAQ https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/faq https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/faq
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  Does the block-mode work like DNS blockers or does it do more advanced blocking? Also, is there a way to securely interface with things such as keepassxc without leaking secrets while piping stuff?
  - jmercouris 5y ago
    Indeed there is; we are cognizant of this problem! As per block mode, it can block stuff by predicates, URLs, and any logic you like.
- rattray 5y ago
  One question I had, which is partly answered in the FAQ, is what rendering and JS engines are used. The FAQ says it can run on either WebKit/WebEngine (Blink) – how does it decide? Which is the default, and are there tradeoffs to using one or the other with Nyxt specifically? What JS engine is used?
  - chalst 5y ago
    The FAQ entry talks of their being a basic interface: the point is that these two engines have code that realises this interface. Other engines could also provide implementations of this interface. I'd be pleased if a Servo hacker stepped up and did this.
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      What would it take to get this working with Servo? I know Servo itself isn't really done yet, but let's ignore that for now.
      - chalst 5y ago
        I hope someone rolls by and answers: I am at the stage of following enough to be interested in the concept of integrating all the parts of a DOM engine with a proper GPU-friendly compositor in a modular way, but not at the stage of understanding the interfaces of the modules.
      - jmercouris 5y ago
        Everything needed is at the bottom of the browser.lisp source file, one would need to implement all `ffi-*` named functions.
      - whitten 5y ago
        What is Servo you want to work with the Nyxt browser?
- pollyranna 5y ago
  The download page says I can install from guix but I don't see it listed as an installable package in "guix search" or on https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/N/ https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/N/ Is it available through guix?
  - mbakke 5y ago
    The Guix package list is paginated, you need to navigate to the second page: https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/nyxt-2.0.0/ https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/nyxt-2.0.0/ If "guix search nyxt" does not work, perhaps you need to 'guix pull'?
  - kagevf 5y ago
    I've installed a few of the v2 pre-releases using guix, and I assume that this version is also available.
- monk_the_dog 5y ago
  Just tried it and my first impression is: "this was built for me! I love it!". One bit of friction: I'm in vi mode. I hit 'f' to follow links. Apparently I need to hit 'i' before it will accept input. It would be better if it started in insert mode. Example: 'f' followed by 'g' just prints 'pressed key g'.
  - jmercouris 5y ago
    Please create an issue on GitHub for this so we do not forget! Thank you!
- bikenaga 5y ago
  1. You list enchant as a dependency - it seems to have been removed from debian testing/unstable (see https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/enchant https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/enchant). You might want to change/adjust the list of dependencies (on https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/blob/master/documents/README.org https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/blob/master/documents...). It didn't seem to matter for the build. 2. I just built nyxt from source on debian testing - make all works, but make install fails with Unhandled SB-INT:SIMPLE-FILE-ERROR in thread #<SB-THREAD:THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {10018782D3}>: Can't create directory /usr/local/share/applications/ I can invoke the browser from the build directory. 3. Is there a way to clear things like history, cookies, form data, and saved passwords (either immediately or automatically when the browser is closed)? It's what I do with firefox. Also, is there a way to automatically clear the cached stuff in ~/.cache/nyxt?
  - jmercouris 5y ago
    You can add a pre-quit, or startup hook handler to clear your cache. Please see the manual section about books.
    - bikenaga 5y ago
      Ignore my comment about make install failing. I just forgot the sudo - worked fine the second time. I'll check the manual about hooks. Thanks.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
This is a cool project that I have tried a few times in the past. To me, the big draw is that it is written in Common Lisp. I was a patron contributor for a while, but when I had problems building from source, I stopped. Interfacing Common Lisp to things like WebKit, GTK, or Qt to build Nyxt was probably the reason I failed building from source, IIRC. This is probably a bad analogy, but forty years ago Lisp Machine subsumed the operating system. In modern times, in some sense the web browser is like an operating system layer, or at least a portable application platform. So, my bad analogy is that Nyxt is like a Lisp Machine. If I have time, I will try to build from source today. I just reread the dev source install instructions, and it does look straight forward. Hopefully being on a M1 MacBook won’t affect the build process.
- jmercouris 5y ago
  Thanks Mark, I really appreciate that. We’re working on a Nix recipe to make it easier on MacOS, making some progress https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/116233 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/116233
- cle 5y ago
  This is the vision from my understanding. I think of it as Emacs for the web, instead of just text. Super compelling vision, I really hope they can pull it off. I’ve tried Nyxt a few times but I find it quite difficult to hack on, at the time it required an elaborate Emacs + SLIME + Common Lisp setup…I don’t use CL very much so it was a lot of work and quite fragile. I hope they can get editing bootstrapped into Nyxt so that I can modify it in Nyxt itself instead of a bunch of complicated external tooling. As it stands, there’s too much friction for me to hack on it. Regardless, tons of promise and I’m eagerly following its development!
  - vindarel 5y ago
    It seems they did it! > New simple built-in editor capabilities so that you can easily script Nyxt without opening up an external editor. (last screenshot)
    - 5y ago
Bladestorm1011 5y ago
Pretty cool, definitely going to look more deep into this. Been using vi which is supported just not sure till what extend, will be messing around with it for a bit.
- jmercouris 5y ago
  It is fully supported, everywhere!
theSealedTanker 5y ago
how does it compare with something like qutebrowser? or using chromium with a extension like vimium?
wraptile 5y ago
I've been using qutebrowser for few years now - how does Nyxt compare to it? I love seeing more keyboard driven software!
- jmercouris 5y ago
  Thanks for the question, we hint at in our FAQ “ Nyxt differs fundamentally in its philosophy- rather than exposing a set of parameters for customization, Nyxt allows you to customize all functionality. Every single class, method, and function is overwritable and reconfigurable. You'll find that you are able to engineer Nyxt's behavior to suit almost any workflow.” https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/faq https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/faq
ibraheemdev 5y ago
Why are most open source browsers based chromium as opposed to gecko? I would think much of the OSS community would be opposed to using google owned software.
- sequence7 5y ago
  I suspect the answer is because of compatibility. Chromium has become the industry standard, everyone tests only on Chrome (and Safari for mobile) so you can expect fewer issues if you're based on chromium.
  - graderjs 5y ago
    But I think it's a valid question. Because for a niche browser (which most of these alternate projects are), mainstream compatibility for all websites doesn't seem like it would be the most important thing. I think the idea of using Gecko[0] is a solid one. :P ;) xx [0]: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev
    - sequence7 5y ago
      I agree it's a valid question and it seems my suspicion is not the main reason. Based on the other replies to the parent it seems that choosing Gecko requires more work.
- mavroprovato 5y ago
  If I'm not greatly mistaken, there is no way to embed Gecko in a desktop application right now
- jmercouris 5y ago
  We are not based on Chromium, we are engine agnostic. As to why no Gecko support? Mozilla does not make it easy!
  - servilio 5y ago
    Have you looked at Servo instead?
ibraheemdev 5y ago
Nyxt just hit the top of the front page recently for anyone interested in reading past discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26509612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26509612
- dang 5y ago
  Thanks! Looks like the previous discussions (including that one) are: Nyxt Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26509612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26509612 - March 2021 (125 comments) Nyxt browser: mouseless cpy/paste - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25956152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25956152 - Jan 2021 (56 comments) Dashboard for Nyxt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151976 - Nov 2020 (2 comments) Nyxt Browser 2.0.0 Pre-release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353927 - Sept 2020 (11 comments)
  - ibraheemdev 5y ago
    I have been one upped :)
    - dang 5y ago
      Sorry- I didn't mean it that way! I'm thinking of adding code to macroexpand any links that people post to previous HN threads into the same format that you see here: "Title - <url> - mm/yy - (number of comments)". I'm not typing that shit out manually :)
gredelston 5y ago
Might wanna change the "Chat" page from Freenode to Libera.chat.
- jmercouris 5y ago
  Yes, will get to that ASAP! Thank you for pointing it out!
kgarten 5y ago
Cool project … tried it in an early version and will play with it again. Was just wondering. From the FAQ there are no links or indications on how to configure it in Vi mode. Also the FAQ mentions the manual/tutorials for „here‘s how you configure it“. maybe I missed sth. Being on a small screen (phone). Yet I was just interested in how the configure / change to vi worked and could not find that on the website. Recommend to add links to the FAQ. Is there somewhere a quick how-to/setup for the vi mode and maybe a walkthough of cool features? (Found qutebrowser way more accessible and stayed with it so far) Edit: typos
- jmercouris 5y ago
  When you start Nyxt there will be a button labeled “common settings” if you click it it will set up Vi mode or Emacs mode for you :-)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
conscion 5y ago
I really like the way Nyxt generates keyboard combos for clickable links (like this image [0]). Does anyone know if there's a program that creates something similar for Windows? Where every clickable element in the focused programs would have one of these tags generated for it. [0] https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/static/image/article/visual-mode-select-paragraph.png https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/static/image/article/visual-mode...
- null621 5y ago
  If you mean within the browser, vim plugins do exactly this. I use one called Vimium, very customizable.
  - reocha 5y ago
    http://vimium.github.io/ http://vimium.github.io/
- kriops 5y ago
  https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/ Is a favorite of mine.
- yewenjie 5y ago
  If inside the browser, I love Tridactyl - https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
- jmercouris 5y ago
  You’ll find many pantomimes of this in other projects. As far as I know Nyxt’s style (showing the URL, title, type of element, and being able to select based on those) is unique.
yewenjie 5y ago
Rather than asking what features does Nyxt have now, I think it is more useful to ask what do they not have compared to something like Firefox or Chromium. I will be very happy if someone can list down the most important features that are lacking in Nyxt.
- jtmoulia 5y ago
  From a week of usage my outstanding missing piece is yubikey support. Really can't complain tho: it's still early, open-source, and a great product.
mdip 5y ago
I think this is the second or third time that I've seen this browser hit the front page. Each time I get a little more interested. The concern that I have is that there's going to be a learning curve to picking this up. Normally, that's fine, but this is my browser. I live in the thing and there's no other piece of software outside of my IDEs that affects my productivity more. When I took the time to learn VIM a few years ago, retrospectively, I could have about spent half as much time learning it as I did and skipped a handful of things I don't use. The tone isn't meant to be negative -- that 50% is tremendously useful and it's rare that I don't over-learn something (I enjoy it). I'm hoping someone who uses Nyxt as their "primary browser"[0] might be able to provide their thoughts on any of my questions -- I use VIM/VIM plug-ins, but Firefox; what's the experience of becoming proficient with Nyxt? Is there any tool/first-timer/quick-start that works better/worse for acquiring the muscle-memory? Outside of "keyboard" ... As a full stack web developer (various front-ends, mostly .NET web FWIW), what are the "big reasons" that I want this (killer app?)? Put other ways: Are there any interesting "one-liners"[0] that solved real problems developing web-sites? Is there any feature that is so amazing that you agonize over it not being available when you're not on your own hardware? Basically, I'm trying to answer (for myself) whether or not it's worth the effort to explore integrating this into my work tooling, so I'd love any other input. [0] I've not used the product; I'm referring to its programmability -- I can see its use (and do this, today, kludg-ily) -- but I'm wondering if there are any use cases that were surprisingly "magical".
- cle 5y ago
  If you think of this as an interactive API over your browser, there are a lot of possibilities, as it significantly lowers the barrier to entry for browser dev. One thing I’ve always wanted is a way to sync cookies between my browser and curl, something like that would be relatively trivial in Nyxt, assuming it exposes APIs for managing cookies (and if it doesn’t, I’d imagine it would be easy to add). I can easily imagine myself writing little functions like I do in Emacs to automate various things, like iterating over all my tabs and shoving their URLs into a text file, or searching through the content of all open tabs, or adding little menu shortcuts like “append this highlighted text to an email message text box in another tab”, or “take the highlighted text, construct a new URL based on it, and open it in a new tab”. I do these kinds of things all the time in Emacs and I love it, I would be excited to use a browser with the same ease of extensibility. I can also imagine, if the community is large enough, that people smarter than me will come up with libraries for Nyxt that blow my mind. This always happens to me when a powerful tool is combined with a strong community.
lucas_codes 5y ago
I use vimium and I love it, but I actually still use the mouse for navigating page links. Many of the websites we use these days are so link-heavy (or just not designed with keyboards in mind?) that pressing f, parsing the characters of the link I want, and then typing them, is still slower are at least more mental effort than using the mouse.
- dreamer7 5y ago
  True, this was my problem with vimium as well. The characters of the link would change even for relatively stable UI functionality like going fullscreen on Youtube. So, there was no muscle memory. Ironically, the only time i would remember i had vimium installed was when i would try to press f and then press a couple more characters while wondering why i installed the plugin in the first place.
- samatman 5y ago
  Really? That was my favourite part of using qutebrowser. I'm already looking at a link when I want to 'click' it, so bringing up the shortcuts puts the relevant one right in the center of my vision. I don't know if it was faster (I have the same question about vim!) but it was fast enough, and more satisfying. Then again, the point of my i3/qutebrowser/etc box was to be keyboard-centric, and I would use it with a "the mouse is lava" philosophy. I should really stand that box up again; too much macOS is bad for the soul...
  - lucas_codes 5y ago
    It is certainly more satisfying, I'll give you that!
Sleepytime 5y ago
I'm tab addicted. Reduce-to-buffer is so cool, and I like being able to save tabs to a file.
- O_H_E 5y ago
  > ... and I like being able to save tabs to a file Yup, my attention was just grabbed
dmos62 5y ago
> Nyxt is web engine agnostic. We utilize a minimal API to interface to any web engine. This makes us flexible and resilient to changes in the web landscape. Currently, we support WebKit and WebEngine (Blink).
- pabs3 5y ago
  Wonder if they plan to add support for Firefox.
  - toastal 5y ago
    I think you mean its engine, Gecko
    - pabs3 5y ago
      Well, it depends how Nyxt works, if it wraps entire browsers or just web engines. Also, Gecko isn't a separate component/library to Firefox so they would have to do major surgery on Firefox to extract Gecko.
creamytaco 5y ago
Security, privacy considerations aside, can I use ublock origin? No? Then forget it.
- jmercouris 5y ago
  OK.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pxc 5y ago
    So I don't like the GP's attitude at all, and I am stunned at how dismissive an unkind they've been on multiple posts about Nyxt. But I think I'm beginning to realize more concretely what they mean about potential security issues with Nyxt and the way it reuses engines from other browsers. I think it's something like this: some functions in engines written for other browsers may assume that they will only be called from other parts of the browsers they're designed for, or similar browsers. They may assume some inputs are safe, or that they'll only be invoked in the context of a sandbox or whatever. That assumption may hold in their original uses, but Nyxt could expose them to novel uses where those assumptions are untrue, and that could have security implications. I think maybe this is the reason that GP assumes Google might go out of their way to break compatibility or discourage the use of their engine with Nyxt. I guess what I'm left wondering is: is it obvious that this would be a negative for Google or Apple or whomever? Why would we expect the security fixes needed for calling some functions in unexpected contexts to get in the way of the engine developers? How could you see that relationship playing out, if Nyxt exposes vulnerabilities in these engines that aren't reachable from the browsers they're designed for?
zzo38computer 5y ago
It look like interesting, although I would think to really make a better web browser, would require heavily modifying the engine or writing a new one (so that the handling of HTML and CSS can be customized too), rather than using the existing one. Also, I would want to support extensions written in C.
math-dev 5y ago
How does this compare to eww? Also does this fit as an emacs package?
- jolmg 5y ago
  > Also does this fit as an emacs package? It doesn't run on emacs, though you can connect to a running instance with emacs.
  - math-dev 5y ago
    Thanks!
jtmoulia 5y ago
Congrats to the Atlas team on the release! Nyxt truly delivers on the Emacs experience in the browser, and the addition of data-profiles to give a Firefox-container-like experience lets me use it as my daily driver. Yup, there are quirks from what I'm used to with Firefox + vimium but with Nyxt 1) I can actually understand and modify the code, and 2) it's delightful to have a browser I can use so keyboard-centrically One of the last gaps for me is being able to use a yubikey from Nyxt, but there's an open issue in the repo which feels accessible :)
- jmercouris 5y ago
  Thanks so much, that is very kind of you to say :-)
mastrsushi 5y ago
Does anyone know of any attempts at writing new web engines? Or at least one built off of WebKit to diverge from Chromium?
- ahane 5y ago
  https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
  - mastrsushi 5y ago
    Flow sounds really cool, a multi threaded browser engine. Most modern ones are forked from KHTML, an engine designed in the 90's before multi threading was possible for consumer computers. They only have 8 developers on the team. I wish them well, but what do they have to offer that vendors and consumers really need? Do people really complain about Chromium being too slow? I wouldn't imagine, if most of the users on the web are using it. Then again I don't know about the niche mysterious world of elite internet browsing.
- jmercouris 5y ago
  It is one of our dreams to resurrect this: https://github.com/atlas-engineer/closure https://github.com/atlas-engineer/closure
- O_H_E 5y ago
  Servo?
  - mastrsushi 5y ago
    Mozilla laid off a lot of the Servo engineers. It's in the hands of the Linux Foundation, so pretty much dead.
JanisErdmanis 5y ago
For a long time I have been willing to write a personalized bookmark manager with a custom way to store and recall them. Nyxt looks like ideal platform to get started. A major thing that puts me off using it is that it does not have a dark mode. I hope that will come with ability to use some chromium or firefox extensions.
- O_H_E 5y ago
  the first screenshot/link are literally for themes/dark-mode
  - e3bc54b2 5y ago
    From the article, I could not understand if it is default or easily selectable. The post and the theme link explains how to create a theme, but not if the dark one shown is available in stock installation.
    - pxc 5y ago
      It has a nice dark mode feature for web pages that is built in, but it doesn't apply to every page by default, or affect the prompt-buffer (minibuffer). Also the code for that theming article doesn't really work, but if you fiddle with it you can get it going somewhat. I say play with it for a few minutes :)
- jmercouris 5y ago
  Our bookmark facilities are quite advanced. You can query by tag, date, name, any combination of things really. I would give it a short investigation. :-)
msla 5y ago
It seems it only has host-based blocking: https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/blob/master/source/blocker-mode.lisp https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/blob/master/source/bl... Is uBlock Origin style blocking a priority? NoScript?
- jmercouris 5y ago
  Well, actually blocking can be done based on predicates and all kinds of rules. That said, uBlock itself is a priority, supporting FF extensions.
philonoist 5y ago
It doesn't seem to have Windows version/binary installer. Help me?
- jmercouris 5y ago
  Help me help you, submit a windows build and I will publish :-D
zzo38computer 5y ago
There are many good ideas, it look like. Many ideas are ones I had wanted, so, it is good. But, not quite everything. Does it support customizing the interpretation of HTML and CSS? Is the web developer console implemented (it is useful for end users too, not only web developers)? Is there a split-screen mode? Can it auto-generate a table of contents? Is the jar: URI scheme supported (I used this to view EPUB files)? Form data saving to local files? Footnotes? Relative URL entry? JavaScript Date spoofing? ARIA view? Regular expression search? Better file selection? Can HSTS be disabled? Animation control? SQL (another way of sorting/filtering tables, copying them to external files, etc)? Adding or changing MIME type handlers? Does it pretty print JSON files? Disabling sounds is implemented, but can you adjust the volume or divert the sound to an external program (that will receive the audio on stdin)? Disabling scripts is implemented, but can you "partially disable" scripts (so that some APIs work and some don't or have a different behaviour)? Can you define your own character encodings? Is there any way to use extensions written in C? Some of the things I listed might already be implemented, and some can probably be implemented easily enough in Lisp, but some might be more difficult to do. There are a lot more things I would have it done differently, requiring probably modifying the engine significantly from common web browsers, I would guess.
shakascchen 5y ago
I'll definitely become a heavy Nyxt user. First, I want to programmatically control what I see on some websites. For example, facebook, linkedIn, or more websites are too distracting, so I'd like to directly fetch some information from them with my signed-in accounts. Second, I am a Common Lisp lover.

359 points by jmercouris 5y ago

If you have any questions, I would be glad to answer them :-) You can also check out our FAQ https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/faq https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/faq

rjzzleep 5y ago
Does the block-mode work like DNS blockers or does it do more advanced blocking? Also, is there a way to securely interface with things such as keepassxc without leaking secrets while piping stuff?
- jmercouris 5y ago
  Indeed there is; we are cognizant of this problem! As per block mode, it can block stuff by predicates, URLs, and any logic you like.
rattray 5y ago
One question I had, which is partly answered in the FAQ, is what rendering and JS engines are used. The FAQ says it can run on either WebKit/WebEngine (Blink) – how does it decide? Which is the default, and are there tradeoffs to using one or the other with Nyxt specifically? What JS engine is used?
- chalst 5y ago
  The FAQ entry talks of their being a basic interface: the point is that these two engines have code that realises this interface. Other engines could also provide implementations of this interface. I'd be pleased if a Servo hacker stepped up and did this.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    What would it take to get this working with Servo? I know Servo itself isn't really done yet, but let's ignore that for now.
    - chalst 5y ago
      I hope someone rolls by and answers: I am at the stage of following enough to be interested in the concept of integrating all the parts of a DOM engine with a proper GPU-friendly compositor in a modular way, but not at the stage of understanding the interfaces of the modules.
    - jmercouris 5y ago
      Everything needed is at the bottom of the browser.lisp source file, one would need to implement all `ffi-*` named functions.
    - whitten 5y ago
      What is Servo you want to work with the Nyxt browser?
pollyranna 5y ago
The download page says I can install from guix but I don't see it listed as an installable package in "guix search" or on https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/N/ https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/N/ Is it available through guix?
- mbakke 5y ago
  The Guix package list is paginated, you need to navigate to the second page: https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/nyxt-2.0.0/ https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/nyxt-2.0.0/ If "guix search nyxt" does not work, perhaps you need to 'guix pull'?
- kagevf 5y ago
  I've installed a few of the v2 pre-releases using guix, and I assume that this version is also available.
monk_the_dog 5y ago
Just tried it and my first impression is: "this was built for me! I love it!". One bit of friction: I'm in vi mode. I hit 'f' to follow links. Apparently I need to hit 'i' before it will accept input. It would be better if it started in insert mode. Example: 'f' followed by 'g' just prints 'pressed key g'.
- jmercouris 5y ago
  Please create an issue on GitHub for this so we do not forget! Thank you!
bikenaga 5y ago
1. You list enchant as a dependency - it seems to have been removed from debian testing/unstable (see https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/enchant https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/enchant). You might want to change/adjust the list of dependencies (on https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/blob/master/documents/README.org https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/blob/master/documents...). It didn't seem to matter for the build. 2. I just built nyxt from source on debian testing - make all works, but make install fails with Unhandled SB-INT:SIMPLE-FILE-ERROR in thread #<SB-THREAD:THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {10018782D3}>: Can't create directory /usr/local/share/applications/ I can invoke the browser from the build directory. 3. Is there a way to clear things like history, cookies, form data, and saved passwords (either immediately or automatically when the browser is closed)? It's what I do with firefox. Also, is there a way to automatically clear the cached stuff in ~/.cache/nyxt?
- jmercouris 5y ago
  You can add a pre-quit, or startup hook handler to clear your cache. Please see the manual section about books.
  - bikenaga 5y ago
    Ignore my comment about make install failing. I just forgot the sudo - worked fine the second time. I'll check the manual about hooks. Thanks.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

This is a cool project that I have tried a few times in the past. To me, the big draw is that it is written in Common Lisp. I was a patron contributor for a while, but when I had problems building from source, I stopped. Interfacing Common Lisp to things like WebKit, GTK, or Qt to build Nyxt was probably the reason I failed building from source, IIRC. This is probably a bad analogy, but forty years ago Lisp Machine subsumed the operating system. In modern times, in some sense the web browser is like an operating system layer, or at least a portable application platform. So, my bad analogy is that Nyxt is like a Lisp Machine. If I have time, I will try to build from source today. I just reread the dev source install instructions, and it does look straight forward. Hopefully being on a M1 MacBook won’t affect the build process.

jmercouris 5y ago
Thanks Mark, I really appreciate that. We’re working on a Nix recipe to make it easier on MacOS, making some progress https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/116233 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/116233
cle 5y ago
This is the vision from my understanding. I think of it as Emacs for the web, instead of just text. Super compelling vision, I really hope they can pull it off. I’ve tried Nyxt a few times but I find it quite difficult to hack on, at the time it required an elaborate Emacs + SLIME + Common Lisp setup…I don’t use CL very much so it was a lot of work and quite fragile. I hope they can get editing bootstrapped into Nyxt so that I can modify it in Nyxt itself instead of a bunch of complicated external tooling. As it stands, there’s too much friction for me to hack on it. Regardless, tons of promise and I’m eagerly following its development!
- vindarel 5y ago
  It seems they did it! > New simple built-in editor capabilities so that you can easily script Nyxt without opening up an external editor. (last screenshot)
  - 5y ago

Bladestorm1011 5y ago

Pretty cool, definitely going to look more deep into this. Been using vi which is supported just not sure till what extend, will be messing around with it for a bit.

jmercouris 5y ago
It is fully supported, everywhere!

theSealedTanker 5y ago

how does it compare with something like qutebrowser? or using chromium with a extension like vimium?

wraptile 5y ago

I've been using qutebrowser for few years now - how does Nyxt compare to it? I love seeing more keyboard driven software!

jmercouris 5y ago
Thanks for the question, we hint at in our FAQ “ Nyxt differs fundamentally in its philosophy- rather than exposing a set of parameters for customization, Nyxt allows you to customize all functionality. Every single class, method, and function is overwritable and reconfigurable. You'll find that you are able to engineer Nyxt's behavior to suit almost any workflow.” https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/faq https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/faq

ibraheemdev 5y ago

Why are most open source browsers based chromium as opposed to gecko? I would think much of the OSS community would be opposed to using google owned software.

sequence7 5y ago
I suspect the answer is because of compatibility. Chromium has become the industry standard, everyone tests only on Chrome (and Safari for mobile) so you can expect fewer issues if you're based on chromium.
- graderjs 5y ago
  But I think it's a valid question. Because for a niche browser (which most of these alternate projects are), mainstream compatibility for all websites doesn't seem like it would be the most important thing. I think the idea of using Gecko[0] is a solid one. :P ;) xx [0]: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev
  - sequence7 5y ago
    I agree it's a valid question and it seems my suspicion is not the main reason. Based on the other replies to the parent it seems that choosing Gecko requires more work.
mavroprovato 5y ago
If I'm not greatly mistaken, there is no way to embed Gecko in a desktop application right now
jmercouris 5y ago
We are not based on Chromium, we are engine agnostic. As to why no Gecko support? Mozilla does not make it easy!
- servilio 5y ago
  Have you looked at Servo instead?

ibraheemdev 5y ago

Nyxt just hit the top of the front page recently for anyone interested in reading past discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26509612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26509612

dang 5y ago
Thanks! Looks like the previous discussions (including that one) are: Nyxt Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26509612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26509612 - March 2021 (125 comments) Nyxt browser: mouseless cpy/paste - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25956152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25956152 - Jan 2021 (56 comments) Dashboard for Nyxt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151976 - Nov 2020 (2 comments) Nyxt Browser 2.0.0 Pre-release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353927 - Sept 2020 (11 comments)
- ibraheemdev 5y ago
  I have been one upped :)
  - dang 5y ago
    Sorry- I didn't mean it that way! I'm thinking of adding code to macroexpand any links that people post to previous HN threads into the same format that you see here: "Title - <url> - mm/yy - (number of comments)". I'm not typing that shit out manually :)

gredelston 5y ago

Might wanna change the "Chat" page from Freenode to Libera.chat.

jmercouris 5y ago
Yes, will get to that ASAP! Thank you for pointing it out!

kgarten 5y ago

Cool project … tried it in an early version and will play with it again. Was just wondering. From the FAQ there are no links or indications on how to configure it in Vi mode. Also the FAQ mentions the manual/tutorials for „here‘s how you configure it“. maybe I missed sth. Being on a small screen (phone). Yet I was just interested in how the configure / change to vi worked and could not find that on the website. Recommend to add links to the FAQ. Is there somewhere a quick how-to/setup for the vi mode and maybe a walkthough of cool features? (Found qutebrowser way more accessible and stayed with it so far) Edit: typos

jmercouris 5y ago
When you start Nyxt there will be a button labeled “common settings” if you click it it will set up Vi mode or Emacs mode for you :-)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

conscion 5y ago

I really like the way Nyxt generates keyboard combos for clickable links (like this image [0]). Does anyone know if there's a program that creates something similar for Windows? Where every clickable element in the focused programs would have one of these tags generated for it. [0] https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/static/image/article/visual-mode-select-paragraph.png https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/static/image/article/visual-mode...

null621 5y ago
If you mean within the browser, vim plugins do exactly this. I use one called Vimium, very customizable.
- reocha 5y ago
  http://vimium.github.io/ http://vimium.github.io/
kriops 5y ago
https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/ Is a favorite of mine.
yewenjie 5y ago
If inside the browser, I love Tridactyl - https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
jmercouris 5y ago
You’ll find many pantomimes of this in other projects. As far as I know Nyxt’s style (showing the URL, title, type of element, and being able to select based on those) is unique.

yewenjie 5y ago

Rather than asking what features does Nyxt have now, I think it is more useful to ask what do they not have compared to something like Firefox or Chromium. I will be very happy if someone can list down the most important features that are lacking in Nyxt.

jtmoulia 5y ago
From a week of usage my outstanding missing piece is yubikey support. Really can't complain tho: it's still early, open-source, and a great product.

mdip 5y ago

I think this is the second or third time that I've seen this browser hit the front page. Each time I get a little more interested. The concern that I have is that there's going to be a learning curve to picking this up. Normally, that's fine, but this is my browser. I live in the thing and there's no other piece of software outside of my IDEs that affects my productivity more. When I took the time to learn VIM a few years ago, retrospectively, I could have about spent half as much time learning it as I did and skipped a handful of things I don't use. The tone isn't meant to be negative -- that 50% is tremendously useful and it's rare that I don't over-learn something (I enjoy it). I'm hoping someone who uses Nyxt as their "primary browser"[0] might be able to provide their thoughts on any of my questions -- I use VIM/VIM plug-ins, but Firefox; what's the experience of becoming proficient with Nyxt? Is there any tool/first-timer/quick-start that works better/worse for acquiring the muscle-memory? Outside of "keyboard" ... As a full stack web developer (various front-ends, mostly .NET web FWIW), what are the "big reasons" that I want this (killer app?)? Put other ways: Are there any interesting "one-liners"[0] that solved real problems developing web-sites? Is there any feature that is so amazing that you agonize over it not being available when you're not on your own hardware? Basically, I'm trying to answer (for myself) whether or not it's worth the effort to explore integrating this into my work tooling, so I'd love any other input. [0] I've not used the product; I'm referring to its programmability -- I can see its use (and do this, today, kludg-ily) -- but I'm wondering if there are any use cases that were surprisingly "magical".

cle 5y ago
If you think of this as an interactive API over your browser, there are a lot of possibilities, as it significantly lowers the barrier to entry for browser dev. One thing I’ve always wanted is a way to sync cookies between my browser and curl, something like that would be relatively trivial in Nyxt, assuming it exposes APIs for managing cookies (and if it doesn’t, I’d imagine it would be easy to add). I can easily imagine myself writing little functions like I do in Emacs to automate various things, like iterating over all my tabs and shoving their URLs into a text file, or searching through the content of all open tabs, or adding little menu shortcuts like “append this highlighted text to an email message text box in another tab”, or “take the highlighted text, construct a new URL based on it, and open it in a new tab”. I do these kinds of things all the time in Emacs and I love it, I would be excited to use a browser with the same ease of extensibility. I can also imagine, if the community is large enough, that people smarter than me will come up with libraries for Nyxt that blow my mind. This always happens to me when a powerful tool is combined with a strong community.

lucas_codes 5y ago

I use vimium and I love it, but I actually still use the mouse for navigating page links. Many of the websites we use these days are so link-heavy (or just not designed with keyboards in mind?) that pressing f, parsing the characters of the link I want, and then typing them, is still slower are at least more mental effort than using the mouse.

dreamer7 5y ago
True, this was my problem with vimium as well. The characters of the link would change even for relatively stable UI functionality like going fullscreen on Youtube. So, there was no muscle memory. Ironically, the only time i would remember i had vimium installed was when i would try to press f and then press a couple more characters while wondering why i installed the plugin in the first place.
samatman 5y ago
Really? That was my favourite part of using qutebrowser. I'm already looking at a link when I want to 'click' it, so bringing up the shortcuts puts the relevant one right in the center of my vision. I don't know if it was faster (I have the same question about vim!) but it was fast enough, and more satisfying. Then again, the point of my i3/qutebrowser/etc box was to be keyboard-centric, and I would use it with a "the mouse is lava" philosophy. I should really stand that box up again; too much macOS is bad for the soul...
- lucas_codes 5y ago
  It is certainly more satisfying, I'll give you that!

Sleepytime 5y ago

I'm tab addicted. Reduce-to-buffer is so cool, and I like being able to save tabs to a file.

O_H_E 5y ago
> ... and I like being able to save tabs to a file Yup, my attention was just grabbed

dmos62 5y ago

> Nyxt is web engine agnostic. We utilize a minimal API to interface to any web engine. This makes us flexible and resilient to changes in the web landscape. Currently, we support WebKit and WebEngine (Blink).

pabs3 5y ago
Wonder if they plan to add support for Firefox.
- toastal 5y ago
  I think you mean its engine, Gecko
  - pabs3 5y ago
    Well, it depends how Nyxt works, if it wraps entire browsers or just web engines. Also, Gecko isn't a separate component/library to Firefox so they would have to do major surgery on Firefox to extract Gecko.

creamytaco 5y ago

Security, privacy considerations aside, can I use ublock origin? No? Then forget it.

jmercouris 5y ago
OK.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pxc 5y ago
  So I don't like the GP's attitude at all, and I am stunned at how dismissive an unkind they've been on multiple posts about Nyxt. But I think I'm beginning to realize more concretely what they mean about potential security issues with Nyxt and the way it reuses engines from other browsers. I think it's something like this: some functions in engines written for other browsers may assume that they will only be called from other parts of the browsers they're designed for, or similar browsers. They may assume some inputs are safe, or that they'll only be invoked in the context of a sandbox or whatever. That assumption may hold in their original uses, but Nyxt could expose them to novel uses where those assumptions are untrue, and that could have security implications. I think maybe this is the reason that GP assumes Google might go out of their way to break compatibility or discourage the use of their engine with Nyxt. I guess what I'm left wondering is: is it obvious that this would be a negative for Google or Apple or whomever? Why would we expect the security fixes needed for calling some functions in unexpected contexts to get in the way of the engine developers? How could you see that relationship playing out, if Nyxt exposes vulnerabilities in these engines that aren't reachable from the browsers they're designed for?

zzo38computer 5y ago

It look like interesting, although I would think to really make a better web browser, would require heavily modifying the engine or writing a new one (so that the handling of HTML and CSS can be customized too), rather than using the existing one. Also, I would want to support extensions written in C.

math-dev 5y ago

How does this compare to eww? Also does this fit as an emacs package?

jolmg 5y ago
> Also does this fit as an emacs package? It doesn't run on emacs, though you can connect to a running instance with emacs.
- math-dev 5y ago
  Thanks!

jtmoulia 5y ago

Congrats to the Atlas team on the release! Nyxt truly delivers on the Emacs experience in the browser, and the addition of data-profiles to give a Firefox-container-like experience lets me use it as my daily driver. Yup, there are quirks from what I'm used to with Firefox + vimium but with Nyxt 1) I can actually understand and modify the code, and 2) it's delightful to have a browser I can use so keyboard-centrically One of the last gaps for me is being able to use a yubikey from Nyxt, but there's an open issue in the repo which feels accessible :)

jmercouris 5y ago
Thanks so much, that is very kind of you to say :-)

mastrsushi 5y ago

Does anyone know of any attempts at writing new web engines? Or at least one built off of WebKit to diverge from Chromium?

ahane 5y ago
https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/
- mastrsushi 5y ago
  Flow sounds really cool, a multi threaded browser engine. Most modern ones are forked from KHTML, an engine designed in the 90's before multi threading was possible for consumer computers. They only have 8 developers on the team. I wish them well, but what do they have to offer that vendors and consumers really need? Do people really complain about Chromium being too slow? I wouldn't imagine, if most of the users on the web are using it. Then again I don't know about the niche mysterious world of elite internet browsing.
jmercouris 5y ago
It is one of our dreams to resurrect this: https://github.com/atlas-engineer/closure https://github.com/atlas-engineer/closure
O_H_E 5y ago
Servo?
- mastrsushi 5y ago
  Mozilla laid off a lot of the Servo engineers. It's in the hands of the Linux Foundation, so pretty much dead.

JanisErdmanis 5y ago

For a long time I have been willing to write a personalized bookmark manager with a custom way to store and recall them. Nyxt looks like ideal platform to get started. A major thing that puts me off using it is that it does not have a dark mode. I hope that will come with ability to use some chromium or firefox extensions.

O_H_E 5y ago
the first screenshot/link are literally for themes/dark-mode
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  From the article, I could not understand if it is default or easily selectable. The post and the theme link explains how to create a theme, but not if the dark one shown is available in stock installation.
  - pxc 5y ago
    It has a nice dark mode feature for web pages that is built in, but it doesn't apply to every page by default, or affect the prompt-buffer (minibuffer). Also the code for that theming article doesn't really work, but if you fiddle with it you can get it going somewhat. I say play with it for a few minutes :)
jmercouris 5y ago
Our bookmark facilities are quite advanced. You can query by tag, date, name, any combination of things really. I would give it a short investigation. :-)

msla 5y ago

It seems it only has host-based blocking: https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/blob/master/source/blocker-mode.lisp https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/blob/master/source/bl... Is uBlock Origin style blocking a priority? NoScript?

jmercouris 5y ago
Well, actually blocking can be done based on predicates and all kinds of rules. That said, uBlock itself is a priority, supporting FF extensions.

philonoist 5y ago

It doesn't seem to have Windows version/binary installer. Help me?

jmercouris 5y ago
Help me help you, submit a windows build and I will publish :-D

zzo38computer 5y ago

There are many good ideas, it look like. Many ideas are ones I had wanted, so, it is good. But, not quite everything. Does it support customizing the interpretation of HTML and CSS? Is the web developer console implemented (it is useful for end users too, not only web developers)? Is there a split-screen mode? Can it auto-generate a table of contents? Is the jar: URI scheme supported (I used this to view EPUB files)? Form data saving to local files? Footnotes? Relative URL entry? JavaScript Date spoofing? ARIA view? Regular expression search? Better file selection? Can HSTS be disabled? Animation control? SQL (another way of sorting/filtering tables, copying them to external files, etc)? Adding or changing MIME type handlers? Does it pretty print JSON files? Disabling sounds is implemented, but can you adjust the volume or divert the sound to an external program (that will receive the audio on stdin)? Disabling scripts is implemented, but can you "partially disable" scripts (so that some APIs work and some don't or have a different behaviour)? Can you define your own character encodings? Is there any way to use extensions written in C? Some of the things I listed might already be implemented, and some can probably be implemented easily enough in Lisp, but some might be more difficult to do. There are a lot more things I would have it done differently, requiring probably modifying the engine significantly from common web browsers, I would guess.

shakascchen 5y ago

I'll definitely become a heavy Nyxt user. First, I want to programmatically control what I see on some websites. For example, facebook, linkedIn, or more websites are too distracting, so I'd like to directly fetch some information from them with my signed-in accounts. Second, I am a Common Lisp lover.