Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

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.

nextos · 9 months ago

Nyxt is very promising, and I hope it gains momentum. The obvious advantage of Nyxt is programmability and keyboard-driven workflows.

However, I use old hardware, and it's a bit slow and laggy. Chromium behaves the same way, so I imagine this is due to WebKit and Blink being significantly heavier than Gecko.

Firefox is really snappy on old hardware, at least when running Linux, and uses a modest amount of memory.

wkat4242 · 9 months ago

Hmm for me on BSD it's the opposite. But every release something breaks in Firefox' GPU acceleration so I've kinda stopped trying to fix it. I assume chromium handles that better. Though I don't use it much.

dotancohen · 9 months ago

What's considered old nowadays? My current desktop had some ~3Ghz AMD processor from ~2020, I don't even remember what it is. Maybe 16 GiB of memory. Runs Firefox and Jetbrains good enough that I've not had to consider upgrading. I use a Debian based distro.

aruggirello · 9 months ago

Firefox with ViolentMonkey and uBlock Origin is my go to solution. I keep hundreds of tabs open, Chrome|ium is simply a memory hog.

srid · 9 months ago

> The obvious advantage of Nyxt is programmability and keyboard-driven workflows.

Example real-world workflows that highlight the advantage of Nyxt over other browsers?

stragies · 9 months ago

Is this because Nyxt is an Electron App? (Is it?) The github commit log mentions it. Or is that just a "variant" of Nyxt?

irthomasthomas · 9 months ago

It's been my default browser for about a year. Most bugs have been fixed. Only twitter still crashes it.

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.

[1] https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser

BoingBoomTschak · 9 months ago

As someone who used Qute for a long time:

* Python is much slower than SBCL (yes, even if rendering is done by Blink); including the lack of threading

* Bookmarks are pure crap, they don't have tags nor directories to sort them better

* Less hackable (e.g. something that should be possible in Nyxt: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/3933)

* Massive gaps: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/2328 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/2492 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/5731 (!!!)

* Per domain/URL settings never progressed further than the initial batch of properties: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/3636

* Adblocking is better than hostfile but still missing a lot compared to uBlock (https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/6480). No script blocking matrix like uBlock "advanced mode" at all.

My impression is that it has been stuck in bug fixing/dependency churn for a long time now. Switched to Firefox while waiting for Nyxt to be usable (apparently, Nyxt 4 will be it).

rnhmjoj · 9 months ago

> My impression is that it has been stuck in bug fixing/dependency churn for a long time now

I don't think it's just your impression: it's exactly what happened. Depending on Qt for the rendering engine means the browser has been tied to the painfully long release cycle of the whole of Qt. Quickly fixing bugs or implementing new features is hard, they have to hack around limited APIs, beg for more and continually fix new bugs introduced by upstream (both Qt and google).

wkat4242 · 9 months ago

Nyxt does have ublock origin? It would be a must have for me too.

treeshateorcs · 9 months ago

you can redirect in QB. this is how i do it (from my config):

    def redirect(info: interceptor.Request):
        if info.request_url.host() == "en.m.wikipedia.org":
            new_url = QUrl(info.request_url)
            new_url.setHost("en.wikipedia.org")
            try:
                info.redirect(new_url)
            except interceptors.RedirectFailedException:
                pass

anonzzzies · 9 months ago

For me; CL/SBCL. It is more fun for me.

manx · 9 months ago

I loved qutebrowser, but many pages didn't work because of the rendering engine. That made me go back to Firefox.

rnhmjoj · 9 months ago

The engine is QtWebEngine, which is essentially Chromium without the proprietary stuff. It may a be a bit outdated, but I've never seen a page not being rendered properly. Maybe you used it way back when the default engine was QtWebKit.

rgreekguy · 9 months ago

Also no Python, all Common Lisp.

llm_trw · 9 months ago

Vim vs Emacs bindings for one.

yasser_kaddoura · 9 months ago

You can configure both to use either.

List of emacs-like config in Qutebrowser:

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/main/doc/hel...

falqun · 9 months ago

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.

bitvoid · 9 months ago

> I don't want to have another chrome derivative that has a fancy new UI to boast.

It uses WebKitGTK, not Chrome.

As for why not vimium?

https://nyxt-browser.com/article/nyxt-versus-plugins.org

sourcepluck · 9 months ago

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.

https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/inspiration.html

That's linked to from the ratpoison page, I enjoyed reading it a few years ago, it hasn't gotten any less funny in the meantime.

Why did I ever leave ratpoison...

medo-bear · 9 months ago

gold. thank you for this. as regards ratpoison, have you looked at stumpwm?

Bigie · 9 months ago

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...

sam_lowry_ · 9 months ago

I am using Vimium all the time. It's so ingrained in my muscle memory that I do not remember the key combinations anymore.

in9 · 9 months ago

I feel I could use it more. I use the link jumping all the time, but that's basically it. What other features do you guys use?

Curiositry · 9 months ago

ramenbytes · 9 months ago

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....

wongogue · 9 months ago

It already has an adblocker. Check the FAQ.

AdBlocker, yes. UBlock Origin, no. Maybe it's since reached feature parity, last time I checked it hadn't from what I could tell.

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swhalemwo · 9 months ago

so much this.. probably once a year I remember that nyxt would be really cool to use, but then I see it still doesn't support adblock on youtube and thus forget it again.

jpgvm · 9 months ago

Not sure if anyone else remembers uzbl but I'm sad that didn't catch on. Will give this a go I guess.

theiasson · 9 months ago

I definitely remember ( and miss) both uzbl and luakit.

ezequiel-garzon · 9 months ago

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.

[1] https://shortcat.app/

hiatus · 9 months ago

I really wish it was open-source. I loved the concept and the app worked in most applications (though not the best with Slack). But I have reservations when it comes to granting full screen access to an app made by some unknown developer.

Vegenoid · 9 months ago

I feel the same, so I simply block its network access (via LuLu), and it works just fine that way. I wish it was open source so I could hack on it and so development could continue - it's a really cool idea and works pretty well.

patrickkidger · 9 months ago