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Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

nyxt.atlas.engineer

191–200 of 262 posts

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#191
post #17

Hmm, not sure it's for me (a bit too much hacker) but I'd definitely like a highly customizable, module based browser with a pure shell by default. Something like Visual Studio Code but with less cruft from the get go. I've never thought about it until I saw this! Now I'm really irked about there not being a solid, mature browser based on extensibility. Where the base is basically an address bar and history awareness…

uzbl (https://www.uzbl.org/) used to do that but it seems it was too heavy in practice.

Today I'm more interestea in turning the web into a more textual format to integrate it in acme (http://acme.cat-v.org/) which is already built around modularity. Making the web a content provider and letting me interact withit the way I want

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modal editing exists because the mouse didn't exist then, and it continues to exist because modal editing is very powerful because you get to be in a mode where you type commands for cursor movements, textual transformations, etc., which allows power users to be very productive.

I don't think I've ever seen evidence that emacs users actually need to be very productive in their text editor even if it works. Though it might not work - the original Mac user research found that keyboards make users think they're faster, but don't actually make them faster, because of time blindness.

Do you have a link for that claim?

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#193
One thing that stopped me from using it is unable to sync history.

Is someone familiar with how hard it would be to use the hook system to allow it to sync with e.g. firefox android?

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#194
post #119
post #70

Looks like Nyxt, a browser "inspired by Vim", inherits Vim's showstopper bug: Being unusable on many non-US keyboards, at least with the default bindings. The 'switch-buffer-previous' command is bound to C-[, which cannot be pressed e.g. on QWERTZ layouts because the [ character requires AltGr. This is like sending around text files encoded in Windows-1252 and expecting things to just work. Sorry folks, but it turns…

Honestly, as a fellow QWERTZ-native, QWERTZ is generally a terrible layout for doing any programming in languages that go beyond round brackets. Instead have all these umlauts you rarely need, even in normal writing, right there - just a bad tradeoff. One might even argue that it's terrible for some other keyboard shortcuts, as they stop making sense: E.g., when Ctrl+Z is undo and Ctrl+X is redo, that makes perfect s…

[deleted]

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#195
post #2

This looks like my type of browser. I currently rely heavily on the vimium chrome extension. Does this support profiles by any chance? I currently use chrome profiles to separate work and personal Looking forward to giving it a spin

You can use your OS to do that: Run: `env HOME=~/nyxt-profile-work nyxt` and `env HOME=~/nyxt-profile-personal nyxt` for separating profiles.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Navigating back a word while in insert mode is just unnecessary. The purpose of insert mode is to insert text, and that’s it. This occupies a very small proportion of total editing time.

> Navigating back a word while in insert mode is just unnecessary. Speak for yourself! I do it all the time. Navigating by word is my primary means of moving through a line. Maybe that’s why I’m happy to be free of vi. It was my primary editor for at least 10 years. And I’m happy to see the back of it.

Can you provide a concrete example, like a piece of text with the current cursor position, the outcome you want to achieve and the sequence of shortcuts you're using to achieve that with your favorite text editor?

> Navigating by word is my primary means of moving through a line.

So how does your new editor do that more efficiently than pressing once, followed by pressing or once for each word?

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#197
post #17

Hmm, not sure it's for me (a bit too much hacker) but I'd definitely like a highly customizable, module based browser with a pure shell by default. Something like Visual Studio Code but with less cruft from the get go. I've never thought about it until I saw this! Now I'm really irked about there not being a solid, mature browser based on extensibility. Where the base is basically an address bar and history awareness…

We basically had this with old Firefox, didn't work out. We kinda have and had this with all the small custom browsers, like Qutebrowser or Nyxt here, doesn't work either. Customizability is a liability, it's work. It comes with many problems, responsibility, work for the users, and not many are willing to take this. Chrome, Firefox and the others are more or less the best we can get regarding balancing customizing, stability, security and user-friendliness.

I mean even in Editor/IDE-Space the popular tools are not the ones who give you the most customizability, but those who give you enough customizing, while not bothering you with the rest, and instead focusing on stable powerful features. Maybe if Coding AI becomes stronger, we can reach this utopia of perfect customizability without all the problems.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#198
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, Hackers hate changing settings. Imagine if those precious keystrokes wasted on setting a keyboard layout could instead be utilized usefully. Say, to post some cloying, whiny critique of someone else's work, wherein one might go so far as invoking their diety in the hopes it might stem the tide of what, I guess, must be a massive recent influx of vi(m)-keybinding-based projects.

Having settings is nice, but I'm not gonna spend a lot of time configuring something that I'm not yet sure will even be useful to me. Power users of / users already invested in your product will use settings to great effect, sure. But defaults matter, if you target anyone else. Actually, you probably understand that on a deeper level. Since we are not talking about a product where "you can configure vim bindings in t…

The problem with defaults is, someone won't like them anyway, so trying to make them likeable to everyone, isn't going to happen, no matter how hard we try.

Using ViM as an example, using the keys that are prevalent on a US keyboard, was a sensible approach when it was developed, and since remapping the keys is probably one of the easiest things to do, it's also not an issue. In fact, writing a simple remap into a text file is easier than remapping keys in most "modern" editors, where the option to do so usually lives behind 2 sub-menus hidden behind a hamburger-button, and forcing me to scroll down an endless list that may or may not have a search function. And good luck if I want to export/import my config, or, god forbid, check it into a repo.

> But defaults matter, if you target anyone else.

Products have to target an audience and cater to them. That's how we ended up with alot of the modern webapps sharing the same usability problems, because "being like everyone else because that's what the audience is familiar with" encourages stagnancy, not evolution.

FOSS Tools on the other hand, have the freedom to explore ideas. If people don't like these ideas, they don't have to use the tools.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#199
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about what "decades of UX research" improvements you are talking about, to me everything about the UI for text editors or browsers hasn't improved much in decades. If you have a laptop with just a touchpad, chances are you'll never get better than vim keybindings. Moreover, the keyboard layouts themselves are centuries old.

> I'm curious about what "decades of UX research" improvements you are talking about Here's the most important one of them: Don't surprise me. Blend in. Look and behave like other programs. There are 50 applications on my system. Yours is one of them. If all other applications use 'Ctrl+C' for copying text, but your application uses 'y', then your application is the problem.

> Don't surprise me. Blend in. Look and behave like other programs.

There is hardly anything in the world that blends in better with everythign else, then a terminal application between other terminal applications.

Re: Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser

#200
post #153

Since we are on the topic of hackers browsers, does anyone know if Firefox can be made to split pane (both for seeing the same page side by side and also doing it for two different pages)? Having done that with file browsers and IDEs, I wonder how come it wasn't a main feature? Nobody needed to compare pages side by side?

Vivaldi does this out of the box

So too does Arc.
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