A keyboard-driven browser you craft in Lisp.
Oriel is written in Sigil, a Lisp derived from Scheme, and renders pages with a modern browser engine. Everything around the page stays small: a window, a status bar and a command line, all Sigil code you can read, change and extend.
https://usesigil.org/Oriel at rest on usesigil.org
What works today
Preview builds of Oriel can already do all of this:
- Tabs, as many as you like. Press T (or type
:tabsor:buffer) to pick one from the tab chooser, close one with D, and reopen it if you change your mind. - Link hints: press f and every link gets a short label you can type to follow it.
- A command line on : that guesses the URL you meant, so you rarely need to type the whole address.
- Vim-style keys, so your hands stay on the keyboard.
- Hardware-accelerated rendering, with software rendering as a fallback.
- Keyboard passthrough for games and canvas apps, so a page that needs every key gets them.
- Recovery from a failed load or a crashed page process.
- Pages rendered with WPE WebKit, the embedded port of WebKit, on Linux.
What comes next
- A load indicator in the status bar: the little from the logo, animated while a page loads.
- Configurable keybindings.
- Per-site settings.
- Content blocking.
Further out, I want the whole browser configurable in Sigil, with a REPL for changing it while it runs.
Build it
Oriel is still early development work, and there's no stable API yet. A preview release is coming soon! Until then, you can build it from source. You'll need Sigil 0.24.4, Linux, Wayland and WPE WebKit 2.54.2 with WPEPlatform from a compatible SDK.
sigil deps install
sigil build oriel --config window-nativeThe README and development guide cover the SDK, the launcher and the tests.