Luakit

Luakit is a very lightweight Webkit based browser for Linux. I was told about this a while ago by dr. dave, who is a regular reader here, and who's comments are always very helpful and interesting. Thanks again, Dave.

Description of it from the Luakit site:

"Luakit is a highly configurable, browser framework based on the Webkit web content engine and the GTK+ toolkit. It is very fast, extensible by Lua and licensed under the GNU GPL v3 license. It is primarily targeted at power users, developers and any people with too much time on their hands who want to have fine-grained control over their web browsers behaviour and interface."

For the last couple weeks I have been playing with it, and I am extremely impressed by the speed and simplicity of it.  There is virtually no overhead at all.  My G4 500MHz Stormtrooper runs it at a clip that would satisfy even the most impatient of people.  With 4 tabs open right now it is using 37MB RAM.  It launches in approx. 1.5 seconds on an old PATA HD, and most sites load in 2-5 seconds.  This blog loads in about 2 seconds. 


The basics

To load a page, run "luakit url"

Control + T loads a new tab

The rest is all up to you via config files.  Here is a list of the config files available for editing:

• rc.lua -- is the main config file which dictates which and in what order different parts of the browser are loaded.
• binds.lua -- defines every action the browser takes when you press a button or combination of buttons (even mouse buttons, direction key, etc) and the browser commands (I.e. :quit, :restart, :open, :lua , etc).
• theme.lua -- change fonts and colours used by the interface widgets.
• window.lua -- is responsible for building the luakit browser window and defining several helper methods (I.e. w:new_tab(uri), w:close_tab(), w:close_win(), etc).
• webview.lua -- is a wrapper around the webview widget object and is responsible for watching webview signals (I.e. "key-press", "load-status", "resource-request-starting", etc). This file also provides several window methods which operate on the current webview tab (I.e. w:reload(), w:eval_js("code here.."), w:back(), w:forward()).
• modes.lua -- manages the modal aspect of the browser and the actions that occur when switching modes.
• globals.lua -- change global options like scroll/zoom step, default window size, useragent, search engines, etc.

Who should use it

For those that prefer pointing and clicking everything they do, this may not be the one for you.  People that don't like using run commands to load pages will certainly be turned off. 

For those that are comfortable computing like this, or at least want to learn to be, this is an extremely flexible screamer of a browser.  The performance is blinding fast for the G4 500MHz it's running on.  A faster system could only do better.


How to install

Fire up the "Root Terminal" in Debian or MintPPC and type:

apt-get install luakit