clibrowser

A full-featured CLI web browser in Rust — picking up where Lynx and Links left off, with modern web support (CSS, JavaScript, cookies, forms).

It renders web pages as flowed text in your terminal, lets you navigate links and form fields with the keyboard, and supports pluggable JavaScript backends — from a sandboxed in-process QuickJS engine to a headless Chrome backend for sites that need a full DOM.

Features

• Text-mode rendering — pages are laid out as wrapped blocks, headings, lists, links, and form fields, with bold/inline styling preserved.
• Keyboard-driven navigation — Vim-style keys, Tab to move between links and form fields, Enter to follow or submit.
• Forms — type into text fields, toggle checkboxes/radios, and submit forms via GET or POST. Focusing a text field enters edit mode automatically (Lynx-style).
• Pluggable JavaScript — run JS in-process via QuickJS (default), drive a headless Chrome backend for heavy sites, or disable JS entirely.
• CSS support — inline and stylesheet CSS are parsed; display: none, noscript visibility, and basic text styling are honored.
• History, bookmarks & cookies — back/forward navigation, a persistent bookmark store, session cookie handling, and a browsing history.
• Configurable — CLI flags select the JS backend, log level, and startup URL.

Install

From source (requires the Rust toolchain):

cargo install --path .

Or build and run directly:

cargo build --release
./target/release/clibrowser https://example.com

Usage

clibrowser [URL] [OPTIONS]

Flag	Description
[URL]	URL to open on startup (defaults to about:home)
--chrome	Use the headless Chrome backend for JavaScript (requires Chrome installed)
--no-js	Disable JavaScript execution entirely
--log <LEVEL>	Log level: error, warn, info, debug, trace (default: warn)

Examples

clibrowser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_emulator
clibrowser https://example.com --no-js
clibrowser https://example.com --chrome --log debug

Keybindings

Key	Action
q / Ctrl-C	Quit
j / ↓	Scroll down one line
k / ↑	Scroll up one line
d	Scroll down 10 lines
u	Scroll up 10 lines
PageDown / PageUp	Page down / up
g	Go to top
G	Go to bottom
Tab / Shift-Tab	Next / previous link or form field
Enter	Follow focused link, or submit the focused form
Space	Toggle checkbox / radio when a field is focused
H / Alt-← / Backspace	Go back
L / Alt-→	Go forward
o	Open a URL
r / F5	Reload
b	Bookmark the current page
B	Show bookmarks
h	Show history
y	Copy the focused link's URL
?	Show help

When a text field is focused, typing edits its value; Enter submits the containing form and Backspace deletes a character (in non-edit mode Backspace navigates back).

Architecture

src/
├── main.rs            CLI entry point (clap args, JS backend selection)
├── network/           HTTP client (reqwest), cookies, response handling
├── dom/               HTML parsing and DOM tree (scraper/ego-tree)
├── css/               CSS parsing (lightningcss) and style resolution
├── js/                Pluggable JS backends: QuickJS, Chrome, or None
├── layout/            Block-based text flow and wrapping (textwrap)
├── renderer/          Terminal rendering via ratatui
├── browser/           State: page model, history, bookmarks
└── ui/                Event loop, keybindings, app controller

Feature flags

Feature	Default	Description
quickjs-engine	yes	In-process JavaScript via rquickjs
chrome-engine	no	Headless Chrome JavaScript via chromiumoxide

Build without the default engine, or with Chrome:

cargo build --no-default-features --features quickjs-engine
cargo build --features chrome-engine

Testing

cargo test

License

Licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 — the same license used by Lynx and Links.