# Vimb Web Browser

I've been a firefox user longer than I can remember, but over recent
years it has begun to annoy me with it's user hating interface
changes and other negative aspects of the mozilla foundation.

This has prompted me to look for an alternative. I'm also a long time
vim user and for the past few years have used browser plugins to
enable vim like key bindings to control the browser. The experience
unfortunately, has always been somewhat lacking.

vimb came to my attention due to it being webkit based and also
having more integrated vim keybinding control.

Building the software was quite straight forward following the
instructions on the github page[1].


## Requirements

* gtk+-3.0
* webkit2gtk-4.1
* gst-libav, gst-plugins-good (optional, for media decoding among 
other things)

From memory I think I had to install gstreamer1.0-libav on devuan to
get youtube videos to play.


## Getting it to work as x-www-browser

Initially my system kept opening firefox when I clicked on links in
the terminal. To rectify this on devuan I tried to run
update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

Unfortunately it didn't detect the browser I'd installed from source
as there was no reference to it in the dpkg alternatives which is
located here: /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/x-www-browser

After adding an entry for vimb like the following:

```
/usr/local/bin/vimb
70
/usr/local/share/man/man1/vimb.1
```

I could then successfully run update-alternatives and select vimb to
be the new default.


## Conclusion

It's taking a little getting used to but I'm starting to really like
it. The fact that there are no tabs stops me from leaving lots of
tabs open so it's actually changing the way I use the web browser, 
for the better in my opinion.


[1](https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb)