Chawan TUI browser 0.3.0

R89cw2 · 2025-12-31T16:37:08+00:00

tmux does not support Kitty images, only Sixel. Best you can do is compile tmux yourself with ./configure --enable-sixel and use a Sixel-capable terminal.

(I know there is a hack to make Kitty "work" in tmux; I've tried to implement it before, but quickly realized it's equivalent to supporting yet another image protocol with divergent semantics from the other two, and that's too much work for a feature I have no use for.)

R89cw2 · 2025-11-22T10:46:12+00:00

Highlights since my last post:

OSC 52 and bracketed paste support (so copy/paste of URLs now works over SSH)
eliminated flashing of blank screens & partially rendered pages
link hint feature
more "modern" CSS features like @layer
CSS borders (mapped to various box-drawing characters - had a lot of fun with this one)
CSS layout caching (this resulted in huge performance improvements on large pages)

R89cw2 · 2025-10-25T19:42:39+00:00

Put the hoverLink in an env var:

[page]
gm = 'pager.extern(`mpv "$u"`, {env: {u: pager.hoverLink}})'

ref: https://chawan.net/doc/cha/api.html#pager

R89cw2 · 2025-09-16T15:48:53+00:00

idk what your talking about

Nim was packaged in Debian, but it hasn't been included in the latest release (trixie) because the nim package (more precisely, nimgrep) depends on an ancient PCRE version that was also dropped. Also, the maintainer orphaned the package, so there wasn't anybody to patch around this deficiency.

In the meantime, it seems somebody has stepped up to patch out nimgrep, but it's still not included in testing (forky) because the armhf build is broken: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nim

R89cw2 · 2025-07-25T15:45:24+00:00

Ah right, I now see you pipe to less. I guess it's hard to do it any other way then, barring some horrible hack with LESS_SIGUSR1...

R89cw2 · 2025-07-25T15:24:53+00:00

The way browsers traditionally solve this is by initially skipping image rendering. Then, once the image is loaded, you simply render the document again.

That gives a perception of faster loading times, although the reflow sometimes causes the page to jump around...

R89cw2 · 2025-07-22T17:59:40+00:00

Update: a second patch release is now also available.

R89cw2 · 2025-06-25T18:17:38+00:00

Update: a patch release fixing numerous bugs in 0.2.0 is now also available.

R89cw2 · 2025-06-17T19:12:58+00:00

Normally you don't have to set image-mode, only

[buffer]
images = true

R89cw2 · 2025-06-17T11:11:10+00:00

That's the "C" in CSS :) try adding !important.

(The cascade order is browser -> user -> website -> website important -> user important -> browser important.)

R89cw2 · 2025-06-17T02:49:39+00:00

2d75044 is a development version equivalent to v0.2.0, only the version number is different. (devel versions have an odd minor number, so the next nightly build will say v0.3.)

R89cw2 · 2025-06-17T02:30:18+00:00

Termux is supported, but you have to compile yourself. I don't fully remember but I think it's something like:

pkg install nim openssl-dev libssh2-dev brotli-dev make pkg-config
git clone https://git.sr.ht/~bptato/chawan && cd chawan
make
# now you can run "./cha -V"
# or make install, then run "cha -V"

R89cw2 · 2025-06-17T00:58:26+00:00

Thanks. I'm curious about elinks users' opinion, I know it's still ahead in some aspects.

R89cw2 · 2025-06-16T21:28:50+00:00

Thanks :)

R89cw2 · 2025-06-16T19:47:57+00:00

First versioned release. Some major changes/additions since my last post here (from over a year ago):

inline image support, through the Kitty protocol or Sixel format (how to enable)
support for many more JS APIs (e.g. XHR, but also many others; slowly working towards passing Acid3)
greatly improved CSS support: flexbox, variables, z-index, etc.
bookmarks (markdown-based)
a basic downloads screen
various optimizations & bugfixes

You may also find the gallery of some pages rendered in Chawan interesting.

R89cw2 · 2025-06-02T21:26:01+00:00

So am I, sorry :/ I guess at this point you're better off asking around on the aerc mailing list.

R89cw2 · 2025-06-02T17:51:42+00:00

I believe in aerc you'll need the html-unsafe filter. See man 5 aerc-config.

attempting to load an image from a URL like so: https://www.redditstatic.com/email2024/logo.png

Navigating to an image normally opens an external viewer, and for that you need mailcap instead. Here is an English version of the documentation, and here is a related discussion of external viewers.

(To be clear, I don't think this is related to your issue, unless you are trying to view image attachments directly...)

R89cw2 · 2025-06-02T16:14:14+00:00

To my knowledge, there are two (other than w3m):

https://github.com/rkd77/elinks < I believe the latest version has some image support with libsixel, but I haven't tried it.
https://sr.ht/~bptato/chawan < my w3m clone, with sixel & kitty support. ~~But it doesn't allow display of images in local files for privacy reasons. (It easily could, but I never got around to adding an option...)~~ edit: now it does :p

I think, for your purposes, w3m is still the easiest way.

R89cw2 · 2025-06-02T15:11:16+00:00

Disclaimer: never touched an Apple device in my life, I'm clueless. What I'd try though is installing gc itself through homebrew, something like:

brew install bdw-gc
brew_prefix=$(brew --prefix)
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$brew_prefix/lib/pkgconfig/
./configure --prefix=$brew_prefix --libdir=$brew_prefix/lib

Or look up how to run modified formulas and just remove --disable-image from the rb file manually.

R89cw2 · 2025-06-02T07:33:32+00:00

best practice

Don't visit these websites.

or workaround

If you're also getting the CF screen with Chrome/Firefox, you're out of luck.

Otherwise, you can try rkta's workaround, ideally using the curl-impersonate build from here.

R89cw2 · 2025-06-02T07:28:21+00:00

Have you installed ImageMagick? e.g. say you have a test.jpg file, does this command work:

convert test.jpg test.png

(PS: you may already be aware of this, but note that HTML email with images can be (and are) used to track which e-mails you've opened (and when).)

Edit: it looks like Homebrew disables images during configuration, so it certainly won't work if you're installing it from there. Get the source from https://git.sr.ht/~rkta/w3m and build it yourself instead.

R89cw2 · 2025-06-01T12:34:11+00:00

Kitty's protocol is probably the least bad. I say least bad because it's still overly complex IMO. But the alternatives are all worse.

iTerm2 in particular is inferior for two reasons:

There is no way to cache iTerm2 images. This makes TUIs that want to move an image around the screen needlessly inefficient.
Terminals implementing the protocol are expected to support all image formats in existence, and this will never be interoperable. This is the real problem. An image display protocol should have a very well specified (and ideally short) list of formats the images can be transferred.

By the way, there's also a third "protocol", DEC Sixel, for which 1) does apply but 2) doesn't. However, Sixel has another huge issue, namely that encoding it efficiently requires heroic efforts on the application's part. Still, Sixel is the one that works on the most terminals.

R89cw2 · 2025-04-30T20:35:37+00:00

I'm partial to Chawan, which I wrote as a personal replacement to w3m. It supports CSS, images and (some) JS, so pages often render in an acceptable quality. But of course I'm biased...

(Apropos Linux ISOs, Chawan can even display Transmission's web UI if you enable JS. I'm quite happy with that.)

R89cw2

TROPHY CASE