Conkeror Comes Unstuck

The surgery was a success. Conkeror has landed its separation manuever. Really, honestly, I wasn’t sure for a second.

Conkeror is a keyboard-driven browser. You navigate links with the keyboard. Select text with the keyboard. And you can add commands using JavaScript. Since its commands are loosely based on Emacs commands, you can combine key cuts in really fantastic ways.

• Like: the command g hackety.org takes you here.
• Ctrl-u g hackety.org opens this site in a new buffer (like a tab.)
• f 12 opens link #12.
• Thus, Ctrl-u f 12 opens link #12 in a new buffer.

Use Ctrl-h t to get briefed. And Ctrl-h b for the cheat codes.

Previously, Conkeror was a Firefox extension. Late last year the team detached from Firefox and started rebuilding the browser on top of Xulrunner. This seemed a perilous move at first, but it’s really energized the developers and has resulted in some great features. Such as the minibuffer, simpler bookmarks work with g, much improved link highlighting.

Installation is a bit of a trial. You just need to be sure you start with the specific Xulrunner distro mentioned on the wiki.

On Linux, after you get Xulrunner, it’s along the lines of:

git clone git://repo.or.cz/conkeror.git
cd conkeror
./build.sh xulapp
sudo ./install.sh

And you’ll have /usr/local/bin/conkeror.

The new link following is just genius. Previously, links on the page were all numbered right when you hit a page. Some times this would blow the layout. (Such as the del.icio.us sidebar.) And a lot of times it would slow page loading. Really, it wasn’t until I was able to kill half of my custom link styling javascripts that I realized how nicely Conkeror was coming along.

Now, pages are loaded just as in Firefox. You hit n and it hovers a highlight over all links and form elements in view. The highlight doesn’t break any layouts. And, yeah, it’s doesn’t highlight the whole page. Just the stuff you can actually see.

So even if you’re at the bottom of the page, the link numbers aren’t in the hundreds.

If you’d rather not use numbers, you can also type the text of the link to follow. I type s and it limits the links to those with text containing that letter.

Okay, check out this script. This goes in the .conkerorrc.

interactive("proxy-port",
  "Change the HTTP proxy port.",
  function (I) {
    var portnum;
    user_pref("network.proxy.http_port", 
      portnum = (yield I.minibuffer.read($prompt = "Proxy port:")));
    I.minibuffer.message("port set to " + portnum);
  });

See, you can use the minibuffer (the command line) as a prompt. In this script, I’m prompting for a port number. Using the minibuffer.read("Proxy port:") line. And print a success with minibuffer.message.

There’s a similar method read_hinted_element_with_prompt that prompts for an element and you can type in the element’s text or pick its number off the page. Really, this browser needs a nice scripter’s guide once the git pull dries up.