dunlin/doc/index.md

Dunlin - a extensible Fennel-based web browser

The dunlin (Calidris alpina) is a small wader. It is a circumpolar breeder in Arctic or subarctic regions. Birds that breed in northern Europe and Asia are long-distance migrants, wintering south to Africa, southeast Asia and the Middle East. Birds that breed in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic migrate short distances to the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North America, although those nesting in northern Alaska overwinter in Asia.

Dunlin is a GTK-based Webkit browser which can be extended in (indeed, is mostly written in) Fennel.

Why does the world need another half-assed Webkit browser?

It doesn't, really. But me, personally, I think I do. I want a browser that lets me easily change keybindings/add commands to do things like:

• find the open Fediverse tab and post a message
• watch a local html file and reload when it changes
• search the {Lua reference, Ruby docs, GTK docs} for term instead of wading through the the SEO cesspool that is the internet in 2022
• search in previously "liked" pages for the thing I found three weeks ago, instead of ... ditto
• find the tab that's playing music and pause the player (instead of muting it)
• more stuff I haven't thought of

Full disclosure: Dunlin today can do none of these things, but if I borrow enough design decisions from Emacs, I hope some day it will

Installation and getting started

If you're using Nix, you can run nix-shell to pull all the dependencies. Otherwise .. Luarocks? Refer to default.nix and shell.nix and obtain:

• All Lua packages listed in any lua5_3.withPackages stanza
• All system packages listed in any buildInputs or nativeBuildInputs stanzas.

To run the browser,

$ fennel dunlin.fnl

Dunlin will open a socket in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to allow communication with a Fennel REPL. You can run the repl.sh script to connect to it with socat.

Running tests

Tests are in test/*.fnl. The test coverage is not 100% nor will it ever be, probably: tests exist only for the bits that were hard to write (algorithmically complex) and easy to test (not full of UI).

make watch will watch the filesystem in this directory and run the tests whenever something changes.

Running everything

There's a Procfile that starts the test runner and a Fennel repl and probably in time some other useful things. I use it with Overmind - overmind start -D; overmind connect to create a tmux session.