 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2025) |
qutebrowser is a free, open-source web browser that is keyboard-focused and minimal in design. [1] Written in Python and using PyQt (a set of Python bindings for Qt), qutebrowser aims to offer a lightweight browser that can be primarily operated with keyboard commands inspired by Vim-style keybindings.
qutebrowser's distinguishing characteristics include:
qutebrowser was originally developed by Florian Bruhin (known online as "The-Compiler") and released publicly in 2014. [3] It grew out of a personal project to create a browser with a keyboard-oriented interface, filling a niche not fully addressed by mainstream browsers.
Over time, the browser expanded its user base among individuals who prefer minimal or tiling window manager setups, developers who enjoy Vim-like keybindings, and users seeking an alternative to feature-heavy browsers. qutebrowser was packaged for multiple Linux distributions, and unofficial builds exist for other platforms such as Microsoft Windows and macOS.
qutebrowser is developed on platforms like GitHub, where users can report issues, submit pull requests, and contribute documentation. [4] Releases typically include new configuration options, performance improvements, and occasional security patches. Its community of volunteers frequently provides feedback on feature requests and shares user scripts.
Tech journalists and open-source enthusiasts generally praised qutebrowser for:
However, critics note that some users may find the minimal interface challenging to learn initially and that certain modern web features or plugins may lack full support depending on the Qt backend in use.
While qutebrowser remains a niche application, it gained a loyal following in certain technical communities, especially among Linux users who prefer low-resource or keyboard-driven tools. [6] Some distributions, like Arch Linux and Gentoo Linux, include qutebrowser in their official repositories, reflecting an active interest from open-source maintainers.
Qt or is a cross-platform application development framework for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems with little or no change in the underlying codebase while still being a native application with native capabilities and speed.
Vim is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program. It is an improved clone of Bill Joy's vi. Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar, derived Vim from a port of the Stevie editor for Amiga and released a version to the public in 1991. Vim is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. Since its release for the Amiga, cross-platform development has made it available on many other systems. In 2018, it was voted the most popular editor amongst Linux Journal readers; in 2015 the Stack Overflow developer survey found it to be the third most popular text editor, and in 2019 the fifth most popular development environment.
Dillo is a minimalistic web browser particularly intended for older or slower computers and embedded systems. It supports only plain HTML/XHTML and images over HTTP and HTTPS; scripting is ignored entirely. Current versions of Dillo can run on Linux, BSD, OS X, IRIX and Cygwin. Due to its small size, it was the browser of choice in several space-conscious Linux distributions. Dillo is free software, released under the GNU GPL-3.0-or-later.
Pentadactyl was a Firefox extension forked from the Vimperator and designed to provide a more efficient user interface for keyboard-fluent users. The design is heavily inspired by the Vim text editor, and the authors try to maintain consistency with it wherever possible. It is now maintained as a Pale Moon extension.
In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with the organization of the screen often dependant on mathematical formulas to organise the windows into a non-overlapping frame. This is opposed to the more common approach used by stacking window managers, which allow the user to drag windows around, instead of windows snapping into a position. This allows for a different style of organization, although it departs from the traditional desktop metaphor.
Poppler is a free and open-source software library for rendering Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. Its development is supported by freedesktop.org. Commonly used on Linux systems, it powers the PDF viewers of the GNOME and KDE desktop environments.
Midori is a free and open-source web browser. In 2019, the Midori project was acquired by the Astian Foundation. After the acquisition, the project became a derivative of the Firefox browser.
Chromium is a free and open-source web browser project, primarily developed and maintained by Google. It is a widely-used codebase, providing the vast majority of code for Google Chrome and many other browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Samsung Internet, and Opera. The code is also used by several app frameworks.
The Wing Python IDE is a family of integrated development environments (IDEs) from Wingware created specifically for the Python programming language with support for editing, testing, debugging, inspecting/browsing, and error-checking Python code.
Uzbl is a discontinued free and open-source minimalist web browser designed for simplicity and adherence to the Unix philosophy. Development began in early 2009 and is still considered in alpha software by the developers. The core component of Uzbl is written in C, but other languages are also used, most notably Python. All parts of the Uzbl project are released as free software under GNU GPL-3.0-only.
Veusz is a scientific plotting package. Veusz is a Qt application written in Python, PyQt and NumPy. It is freely available for anyone to distribute under the terms of the GPL. It is designed to produce publication-quality plots. The name should be pronounced as "views".
xombrero is a discontinued open-source web browser developed with a goal to be a lightweight and secure replacement for full featured browsers like Firefox. The browser has found a niche among minimalist browsers for heavy keyboard users by balancing minimalism with usability.
A lightweight web browser is a web browser that sacrifices some of the features of a mainstream web browser in order to reduce the consumption of system resources, and especially to minimize the memory footprint.
Spyder is an open-source cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) for scientific programming in the Python language. Spyder integrates with a number of prominent packages in the scientific Python stack, as well as other open-source software. Created by Pierre Raybaut and released in 2009 under the MIT license, since 2012 Spyder has been maintained and continuously improved by Python developers and the community.
mpv is free and open-source media player software based on MPlayer, mplayer2 and FFmpeg. It runs on several operating systems, including Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows, along with having an Android port called mpv-android. It is cross-platform, running on ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, RISC-V, s390x, x86/IA-32, x86-64, and some other by 3rd party.
ranger is a free and open-source file manager with text-based user interface for Unix-like systems. It is developed by Roman Zimbelmann and licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The program can accomplish file management tasks with a few keystrokes, and mouse input is optional. In conjunction with extensions including the rifle file opener and scope.sh, ranger can be scripted to open files with pre-defined programs, and to display a preview of the selected file by calling external programs.
nnn is a free and open-source, text-based file manager for Unix-like systems. It is a fork of noice and provides several additional features, while using a minimal memory footprint It uses low-level functions to access the file system and keeps the number of reads to a minimum, allowing it to perform well on embedded devices. As the base program follows a minimal design philosophy, additional features and functionality are available via user plugins.
Lector is a free e-book reading application for desktop Linux systems that also has basic collection management features.