Uzbl to you too!

I’ve been trying uzbl for the last few days and I am pretty much impressed on how useful such a small application can be in certain usage cases!

I installed it on my Debian testing using the following blog post: Installing uzbl on Debian Squeeze .
Be sure to make install else you’ll have no config and uzbl will be unusable!!!

The first place I used it was for the urlLauncher plugin of urxvt. On my .Xdefaults I have the following piece of code:
urxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher,-option-popup,-selection-popup,-realine
urxvt.matcher.button: 1
urxvt.urlLauncher: /usr/local/bin/urxvt-url.sh

and my /usr/local/bin/urxvt-url.sh contains:
#!/bin/sh
uzbl "$1"

Now every url on the console get’s highlighted and I can open it with uzbl. And that means opening really fast!

Example:
urxvt terminal (tabbed by fluxbox) with some urls highlighted by the perl matcher plugin of urxvt:
urxvt-url-highlight

left clicking on one of the urls opens it with uzbl:
uzbl-window

Apart from that, I’ve started using uzbl to open links on instant messengers, IRC clients and in every other place that people send me simple links to check out or I need a fast browser instance. Some people might say that it looks like links2 graphical mode, but it’s NOT like opening urls with “links -G” because uzbl is based on webkit and that means it can deal with javascript, java, flash, whatever…

I just love the way you can keybind all the actions you want on it…on the example config that comes with it, you quit the browser by typing ZZ…how great is that ? 😀

Some usage tips
1) Tabbed behavior (if you have fluxbox):
In ~/.config/uzbl/config add
bind t _ = spawn uzbl --uri %s
and in ~/.fluxbox/apps add the [group] tag before the [app] tag for uzbl like that:

[group]
 [app] (name=uzbl) (class=Uzbl)
  [Workspace]   {0} 
  [Head]    {0} 
  [Dimensions]  {800 1284}
  [Position]    (UPPERLEFT) {0 0}
  [Maximized]   {yes}
  [Jump]    {yes}
  [Close]   {yes}
[end]

Now the command t www.google.com inside uzbl, will open a new tabbed window of uzbl with www.google.com loaded in it.

2) Close uzbl window with ctrl+w
In ~/.config/uzbl/config add:

bind     ctrl+v ctrl+w    = exit

(press ctrl+v ctrl+w one after the other and you will get something like ^W in the file)

P.S. If you are a person that just came from the point and click windows world to the beautiful world of linux, or you are a person that loves bloated desktop managers like KDE/gnome/etc or bloated applications like firefox/iceweasel/konqueror don’t even think of installing it. You’ll never understand its value…
P.S.2. If Richard Stallman decided to browse the web and had an internet connection uzbl would probably be his browser of choice 😛

Switching from Iceweasel to Swiftfox on debian

I’ve bumped into an Iceweasel + adblock plus bug: iceweasel: AdBlock Plus (1.0.2) custom element hiding filters does not work
It looks like Iceweasel from the stable branch of debian (version 3.0.6-1) has a problem hiding elements from websites. That makes some parts of adblock plus useless and ads start appearing on various websites.
What’s weird is that the problem only appears on Iceweasel and not on official Firefox (as the bug report says).

My options were to either a) switch to a testing/unstable version of Iceweasel from debian, b) get a binary package from firefox website or c) get another custom version. I chose method c) and I got swiftfox. Since Swiftfox provides a nice debian repo it was really easy to install and test. The whole experiment got even more interesting since swiftfox provides builds for firefox version 3.5…

After a update-alternatives --config x-www-browser I was ready to test it.
Swiftfox 3.5b4 works great with adblock plus and it even feels a bit faster. I can’t really tell for sure though. The only addon I had to reinstall was firegpg.

My impressions are great so far and I think I will keep it, at least until the bug mentioned gets resolved somehow on the stable branch.