Browsh

A fully interactive, realtime and modern browser rendered to TTY

or Firefox in your terminal 😲

// Gifs go here

Why?

I'm travelling around the world and sometimes I don't have very good Internet. If all I have is a 3kbps connection tethered from my phone then it's good to SSH into my server and browse the web through elinks. That way my server downloads the web pages and uses the limited bandwidth of my SSH connection to display the result. But it lacks JS support and all that other modern HTML5 goodness. So Browsh is simply a way to have the power of a remote server running a modern browser, but interfaced through the simplicity of a terminal and very low bandwidth.

Why not VNC? Well VNC is certainly one solution but it doesn't quite have the same ability to deal with extremely bad Internet. Also, Browsh can use MoSH to further reduce the bandwidth and stability requirements of the connection. Mosh offers features like automatic reconnection of dropped connections and diff-only screen updates. Furthermore, other than SSH or MoSH, Browsh doesn't require a client like VNC.

Another reason could be to offload the battery-drain of a modern browser from your laptop. If you're a CLI-native, then you could potentially get a few more hours life if your CPU-hungry browser is running somehwere else on mains electricity.

But of course the biggest reason for Browsh is probably just that it's cool geekery. You may just appreciate the sheer simplicty of browsing a text-based web in your terminal.

Installation

Download a https://github.com/tombh/browsh/releases (~2MB). You will need to have Firefox >=57 aleady installed.

Or download and run the Docker image (~800MB) with: docker run -it tombh/browsh

Usage

Most keys and mouse gestures should work as you'd expect on a desktop browser.

CTRL+l Focus URL bar ALT+P Take screenshot

Contributing

To setup a dev env you will need NodeJS and Golang installed. If you get stuck setting up your env, take a look in .travis.yml, it has to setup everything from scratch for every push to Github.

I'd recommend [nvm](https://github.com/creationix/nvm) for NodeJS - note that nvm install will automatically parse the .nvmrc version in this repo to get the correct NodeJS version. For Golang it's probably best to just use your OS's package manager. The current Golang version being used is stored in .travis.yml.

You'll then need to install the project dependencies. For the webextension, just run: npm install inside the webext/ folder. For the CLI client you will first need to install dep, there is a script for this in interfacer/contrib/setup_go.sh. I don't fully understand Golang's best practices, but it seems you are forced to keep your Go project's code under $GOPATH/src, you might be able to get away with symlinks. Anyway, to install the dependencies use: dep ensure inside the interfacer/ folder.

Then the ideal setup for development is:

• have Webpack watch the JS code so that it rebuilds automatically: webpack --watch
• run the CLI client without giving it the responsibility to launch Firefox: go run ./interfacer/*.go -use-existing-ff
• have Mozilla's handy web-ext tool run Firefox and reinstall the webextension everytime webpack rebuilds it: (in webext/dist) web-ext run --verbose --url https://google.com

License

GNU General Public License v3.0