5 ms·

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

by 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.
vindarel 5y ago
I can give you example snippets I was able to write for Nyxt, that I find quite exciting, as premises of an integrated platform, bluring the lines between a web browser and other applications. I don't agonize in not having them in other browsers, yet, but I still find the Nyxt capacities they illustrate exciting. - first, there's a simple file manager in Nyxt (Webkit's), the open file command is bound to C-x C-f, just as in emacs, so it's at easy reach. We can open a directory view, an HTML file, a video in Nyxt. I wrote a snippet to dispatch to the right application depending on the extension. There was no such thing buit-in, but I could add it. Similarly, I added a command (M-x open-home-directory) to open the home directory. It's easy to write such simple commands. - there's a built-in git cloner (I contributed it, uh). M-x git-clone and it asks for a directory. I can open a file or directory with emacsclient. - we can write hooks: I have one to open reddits links in old.reddit. - I have M-x download-video (built-in maybe?) that fires youtube-dl. - I have M-x fip-radio-save-current-playing-song, that scrapes the song data on the radio's website and saves it in a text file. I can view them in HTML, I can M-x listen-saved-song, that searches it on youtube (it could find on a directory if I already have it). => they are little things that I usually do in a terminal that I now do in a browser. Nyxt gives me a nice fuzzy completion prompt for any list of strings, it gives me the possibility to print rich text, etc. There's something I didn't manage to do yet but am wanting very much, is to be able to react to Webkit web events. Last time I checked they were not exposed on Nyxt, only on the C side. I would react to button clicks, I would add new buttons on the page and react to them. That'd be awesome. All this is written in Common Lisp, that is strange at first (rest assured, you're normal), but it's a great language with a long history of industry use, so it's solid and it's good to have it on my toolbet. I am now lauching new services in CL rather than in Python, that is so slow, unstable and error prone. my snippets: https://github.com/vindarel/next-init.lisp/ https://github.com/vindarel/next-init.lisp/ (outdated, I didn't follow the latest changes) other great config: https://github.com/tviti/next-cfg/ https://github.com/tviti/next-cfg/ and https://github.com/tviti/next-notebook https://github.com/tviti/next-notebook (interface with Jupyter) An honest comparison with Python, workflow and ecosystem: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/pythonvslisp/ https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/pythonvslisp/ (mine)
forgotmypw17 5y ago
I don't use Nyxt, but I use a similar browser called qutebrowser. It is keyboard-first, and there are even a few things for which mouse bindings haven't been added yet. I had a similar experience as you describe, where I first heard about it a couple of times, but backed off from the learning curve. Eventually, I was fed up with the second-class-citizen state of keyboard bindings in Firefox and Chrome via Vimium/VimFX. I think the XUL "deprecation" effort was the final straw for me. I remembered browsing with Opera years ago, around version 4.x or 5.x, when keyboard bindings were first-class in Opera. I decided to lean in and do it. It took me about three days of retraining myself and looking into the cheatsheet on a regular basis before I became productive, and a bit longer to really feel an improvement over the previous ways. But now I would never go back, and I loathe having to open Chrome for slow heavy sites (it's still faster.) I really feel like I'm in a whole new world of browsing, where the browser really works for me and helps me access the information as quickly as imaginably possible. It's one of the most "futuristic" things I've experienced, just pressing the keys on the keyboard, a bunch of "gibberish" appearing in my screenkey feedback, and the browser dancing around the pages, doing exactly what I want (except when I accidentally start typing out of insert mode.)

by mdip 5y ago

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.

vindarel 5y ago

I can give you example snippets I was able to write for Nyxt, that I find quite exciting, as premises of an integrated platform, bluring the lines between a web browser and other applications. I don't agonize in not having them in other browsers, yet, but I still find the Nyxt capacities they illustrate exciting. - first, there's a simple file manager in Nyxt (Webkit's), the open file command is bound to C-x C-f, just as in emacs, so it's at easy reach. We can open a directory view, an HTML file, a video in Nyxt. I wrote a snippet to dispatch to the right application depending on the extension. There was no such thing buit-in, but I could add it. Similarly, I added a command (M-x open-home-directory) to open the home directory. It's easy to write such simple commands. - there's a built-in git cloner (I contributed it, uh). M-x git-clone and it asks for a directory. I can open a file or directory with emacsclient. - we can write hooks: I have one to open reddits links in old.reddit. - I have M-x download-video (built-in maybe?) that fires youtube-dl. - I have M-x fip-radio-save-current-playing-song, that scrapes the song data on the radio's website and saves it in a text file. I can view them in HTML, I can M-x listen-saved-song, that searches it on youtube (it could find on a directory if I already have it). => they are little things that I usually do in a terminal that I now do in a browser. Nyxt gives me a nice fuzzy completion prompt for any list of strings, it gives me the possibility to print rich text, etc. There's something I didn't manage to do yet but am wanting very much, is to be able to react to Webkit web events. Last time I checked they were not exposed on Nyxt, only on the C side. I would react to button clicks, I would add new buttons on the page and react to them. That'd be awesome. All this is written in Common Lisp, that is strange at first (rest assured, you're normal), but it's a great language with a long history of industry use, so it's solid and it's good to have it on my toolbet. I am now lauching new services in CL rather than in Python, that is so slow, unstable and error prone. my snippets: https://github.com/vindarel/next-init.lisp/ https://github.com/vindarel/next-init.lisp/ (outdated, I didn't follow the latest changes) other great config: https://github.com/tviti/next-cfg/ https://github.com/tviti/next-cfg/ and https://github.com/tviti/next-notebook https://github.com/tviti/next-notebook (interface with Jupyter) An honest comparison with Python, workflow and ecosystem: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/pythonvslisp/ https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/pythonvslisp/ (mine)

forgotmypw17 5y ago

I don't use Nyxt, but I use a similar browser called qutebrowser. It is keyboard-first, and there are even a few things for which mouse bindings haven't been added yet. I had a similar experience as you describe, where I first heard about it a couple of times, but backed off from the learning curve. Eventually, I was fed up with the second-class-citizen state of keyboard bindings in Firefox and Chrome via Vimium/VimFX. I think the XUL "deprecation" effort was the final straw for me. I remembered browsing with Opera years ago, around version 4.x or 5.x, when keyboard bindings were first-class in Opera. I decided to lean in and do it. It took me about three days of retraining myself and looking into the cheatsheet on a regular basis before I became productive, and a bit longer to really feel an improvement over the previous ways. But now I would never go back, and I loathe having to open Chrome for slow heavy sites (it's still faster.) I really feel like I'm in a whole new world of browsing, where the browser really works for me and helps me access the information as quickly as imaginably possible. It's one of the most "futuristic" things I've experienced, just pressing the keys on the keyboard, a bunch of "gibberish" appearing in my screenkey feedback, and the browser dancing around the pages, doing exactly what I want (except when I accidentally start typing out of insert mode.)