Qutebrowser first impressions

I just started using qutebrowser, a Chromium based browser that lets you surf the web using only your keyboard with vim like bindings (if this does not make sense, read on), although you can still use the mouse (but why).

Download qutebrowser from the link below:

qutebrowser | qutebrowser

When you start any webpage with qutebrowser it looks like as follows:

Screenshot taken from qutebrowser viewing their github page

You can see that the browser does not show any toolbar or url bar, etc. It shows the contents of the page and you can interact with the page contents. It has vim like keybindings, so if you want to scroll down the page, unless you are editing the page in insert mode, use the j key, and if you want to scroll up the page, use the k key.

Qutebrowser is a free open source browser based on Chromium and lets you surf with keyboard. You can still use the mouse but it is easier to use the keyboard (the hjkl keys to move about) and use a vim like keybindings to work with the browser. A cheatsheet of how to do so is given below:

Qutebrowser Keyboard Shortcuts

Because it is vim like, and if you want to know more about vim, check out the following page:

about Vim : vim online

Once you install the browser, you will need a few minutes to get used to the key bindings and then move about. Use the ESC key on your keyboard to switch between browsing mode and press the “i” key to insert text in textboxes (such as login windows). For example, this page is written in the Medium text editor on a qutebrowser.

It takes a while to get used to this way of surfing the web. The most useful commands that I have found useful are

• f, press this key to get a list of links, and then once the links show, press that key to visit to the site, so for example, in this window, which is the vim webpage referred to above, if you hit the f button,

Normal Web page before hitting the f key

After hitting the f key, you will see a number of yellow highlighted letters or combination of letters on the page, as follows:

Same page after pressing the `f` key on qutebrowser while browsing

Then, if you press any of the combinations or keys shown on the links, you can visit that page and move around.

Moving around

• If you want to move up the page, use the k key
• If you want to move down the page, use the j key
• Unless you are in editing mode (that is, unless you are inserting text), use :open and then type the URL of a page or a few words. If you type a few words, then it invokes a search engine (in this case “duckduckgo”) and shows the search results. I use “kagi”, so for me the :open command is something like this
• :open kagi.com and then once I am in the kagi webpage to search, I press i key and start writing the search string, and hit enter.
• Every time you invoke the :open <some web page> it opens the webpage in a new tab. If you want to see a list of the tabs, press :gt and it will show you the tabs. Use the up and down keys to select the webpage you want to visit
• If you want to bookmark a page, in browsing mode, do:
• :bookmark-add and hit enter
• If you want to copy the URL of a webpage to the “register”, you use the keys yy, it will store the url of the current page or the page you are visiting at the time to the space, and then where you want to paste it, use the i key and press ctrl-shift-v to paste it. For example, if you want to know more about registers in vim and wondered what they could be, here is a page that talks about registers

https://www.brianstorti.com/vim-registers/

• If you want to take a screenshot of a page, in browsing mode, type :screenshot file.jpg and it wil take the screenshot and store it in the desired location.
• If you want to move to the previous and next pages, use shift h to move to the previous page and shift-l to move to the next page in the sequence

Qutebrowser also allows for customisations, and this will be for another post.