Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser
When are we getting a web engine written in SBCL? :) or how hard would it be, I wonder...
One thing about Nyxt that's great is this idea of trying to push towards being renderer-agnostic. I'm not sure how achievable that is in reality, but when you hear the idea you think oh yeah, surely that would make sense if we want to have good things in the world.
To all the people saying "I like my mouse! Why are these keyboard people so elitist!", the Nyxt people are not on a crusade against your lovely mouse. This isn't ratpoison (a window manager I adored using for a while, but that's a different story).
I have never seen anything on the Nyxt blog or elsewhere claiming mouse-users aren't humans, with full rights, deserving of fine browsing experiences like the rest of us. If I missed something, go ahead, please link it to us all and prove your point.
I've used this browser for a long time. At first, it was very promising, but later on, I found it quite distracting when I needed to work, so I had to give up. If you enjoy the vim-style feel of operation, you might want to try this browser's extension, as it can accommodate your habits along with normal web browsing. Of course, I still hope that the browser can improve, and I will try downloading it again to use for a while.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbai...
A few years ago I doggedly tried to switch to Nyxt for everyday use. I really liked the concept, but at the time, it was too buggy, and constantly crashed on me. I'm going give it another shot.
The one thing holding me back from this is not being able to run UBlock origin on it yet. I keep telling myself that eventually I'll have the spare time to change that myself....
Not sure if anyone else remembers uzbl but I'm sad that didn't catch on. Will give this a go I guess.
This is a timely coincidence for me. I started using yesterday Shortcat [1] for the Mac, and I'm very pleased. It gives you access to pretty much everything with the keyboard, not just the browser. To be fair, Nyxt provides other features such as scripting.
So why this over qutebrowser [1] ? (Which has been my go-to keyboard-first browser for a long time.) This isn't mentioned in the FAQ despite I think being the natural comparison.
Pretty wise comment about web extension support by the main dev here: https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/issues/2875#issuecomm...
Some good ideas here especially the history tree and keyboard history. Don't care much for the hacker = keyboard mentality, I enjoy using my mouse.
The tree based history feature is amazing
Anyone interested can also check out the Vimium browser extension.
I have been interested in this project for a while now. That somebody has now added to the documentation:
"Nyxt is a browser with deeply integrated AI"
Made me entirely lose interest.
It sounds like it could be a privay problem
I did however dig deep to figure out what their EULA and whatnotstates. (or the code)
> Instantly switch between your tabs [...] Easily find relevant tabs with a fuzzy search
I personally use virtual desktops for organizing windows of tabs, but if I was one of the masochists who had 100+ open tabs, I would be moving to this immediately
I love visual navigation and exploration and wish programming was mouse-only too (with an on-screen keyboard to help with names). I’m actually using this setup for browsing - lots of bookmarks and gestures and an on-screen kbd.
Typing is overrated. Very sad that our tools are all typing-based.
(Yes I can point at least at prolog, epilog, mov reg,imm and int nn parts in a 8086 hexdump, if you’re curious how true of a hacker this is.)
Is this standalone or an emacs plugin? I rather use vim motions, so is this locked to emacs, or can i do vim style for things instead?
Took a while to find this (windows user, me - always looking for something new):
For which operating systems is Nyxt available?
Linux BSD (unofficial) macOS (experimental) Windows (unofficial (via WSL))
Official ports for Windows and macOS are in development.
As someone that started in computing when affordable computing was all about keyboard, and mices only existed in computers with prices similar to buying a car or a mortgage, I don't get the hype of keyboard == hacker mentality.
Specially since that on my hacker circle of Demoscene, during the 16 bit days, we were mostly on Atari and Amiga systems, then we had plenty of mouse time, and no one ever stop to wonder we weren't hackers because we had mices.
I was intrigued until I saw this in the FAQ:
> What is Nyxt?
> Nyxt is a browser with deeply integrated AI and semantic document tools that work as a second brain to help you process and understand more, more quickly.
No mention of what sort of "AI", where it's run, etc. If nothing else, this sounds like a recipe for a warm laptop and unreliable results.
Related. Others?
Nyxt – The Hacker's Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39183823 - Jan 2024 (2 comments)
Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36006423 - May 2023 (252 comments)
Nyxt 3.0.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35869378 - May 2023 (30 comments)
Why Lisp? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35852321 - May 2023 (327 comments)
Nyxt 3 Pre-release 1 (a Lisp powered web browser) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32097424 - July 2022 (66 comments)
Lisp in Production: an interview with the guys behind Nyxt Browser [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30271989 - Feb 2022 (15 comments)
Nyxt browser annotations beat pen and paper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30184792 - Feb 2022 (46 comments)
“Why should I use Nyxt if I can use Vimium?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28632422 - Sept 2021 (10 comments)
Nyxt 2.2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28623720 - Sept 2021 (35 comments)
Nyxt – The Internet on Your Terms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037300 - Aug 2021 (1 comment)
Show HN: Nyxt Browser 2.0.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27219646 - May 2021 (121 comments)
Nyxt Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26509612 - March 2021 (125 comments)
Nyxt browser: mouseless copy/paste - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25956152 - Jan 2021 (56 comments)
Dashboard for Nyxt - 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 - Sept 2020 (11 comments)
Any initiative to make a fast powerful UI is a good one imo.
Some features, like clipboard history and window management (i.e "tabs") are better left to the desktop environment though. Every app shouldn't need to reimplement this logic.
Does still need "show multiple pages in the same window" functionality though. If I can segment emacs, I should be able to segment my hacker browser.
Oh, one other thing I just wondered: has there been any progress on interacting with Nyxt from Emacs? I saw something about that at some stage.
I wish it was a GPL compat license, but a common lisp renderer agnostic system has me super curious!
edit: ok this is fast and I like it! eww take a backseat!
It's a great browser, but sadly my 2fa keys don't work with it. Looking forward to the day the underlying engine adds support
Every time I've tried to use Qutebrowser, or similar -- I end up bouncing from it because I want proper extension support.
So "hacker" is someone who is allergic to using a mouse. We've come a long way from what it used to mean..
What I want is a hacker's bookmark manager, but integrated into my existing browser (Firefox).
It's a show stopper that there's no macos support (afaiu). Eagerly awaiting that...
out of 215 comments, how many have tried to use the software?
(my #216: it can be hard to figure out how to get around in it because it is all text.)
Pretty sure firefox is the hackers browser
A hacker browser is either:
- an headless big tech engine (blink|webkit|geeko) with AI bots strapped to a virtual mouse and virtual keyboard, probably installed on compromised systems, and remotely controlled.
- a real everyday hacker browser, namely certainly not with a c++ big tech engine (blink|webkit|geeko), but along the line of a simple no-gc computer language which does not require an insane compiler (excluding de-facto c++,java,rust,etc). Ofc, they will have to piggy back the planned obsolescence of Big Tech browsers and shadowy permanent compatibility breaking of Big Tech with their engine (don't forget big tech wants to make you dependent on their own complexity, not anything else).
As long as qutebrowser still works, I'll stay loyal. Designed for vim keys first and foremost + python config is plenty for me.
WebKit backend though, right?
The comments got me already antagonistic towards the project.
But what I saw was quite nice. I mean I won't switch my default browser but there were some good ideas.
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I don't know, I feel like some of the more pressing features of this browser are already provided with add-ons such as Vimium. And I would really like to see this on a Firefox back-end / compatible with the likes of uBlock origin. I don't want to have another chrome derivative that has a fancy new UI to boast.