pombredanne / luakit

Fast, small, webkit based micro-browser extensible by Lua.

Luakit

luakit is a fast, light and simple to use micro-browser framework exensible by Lua using the WebKit web content engine and the GTK+ toolkit.

Dont Panic!

You don't have to be a developer to use luakit on a daily basis. If you are familiar with vimperator, pentadactyl, jumanji, uzbl & etc you will find luakit behaves similarly out of the box.

Requirements

• gtk2
• Lua (5.1)
• lfs (lua file system)
• libwebkit (webkit-gtk)
• libunique
• sqlite3

Compiling

To compile the stock luakit run:

make

To link against LuaJIT (if you have LuaJIT installed) run:

make USE_LUAJIT=1

To build without libunique (which uses dbus) run:

make USE_UNIQUE=0

To build with a custom compiler run:

make CC=clang

Note to packagers: you may wish to build luakit with:

make DEVELOPMENT_PATHS=0

To prevent luakit searching in relative paths (./config & ./lib) for user configs.

The USE_LUAJIT=1, USE_UNIQUE=0, PREFIX=/path, DEVELOPMENT_PATHS=0, CC=clang build options do not conflict. You can use whichever you desire.

Installing

To install luakit run:

sudo make install

The luakit binary will be installed at:

/usr/local/bin/luakit

And configs to:

/etc/xdg/luakit/

And the luakit libraries to:

/usr/local/share/luakit/lib/

To change the install prefix you will need to re-compile luakit (after a make clean) with the following option:

make PREFIX=/usr
sudo make PREFIX=/usr install

Use Luakit

Just run:

luakit [URI..]

Or to see the full list of luakit launch options run:

luakit -h

Configuration

The configuration options are endless, the entire browser is constructed by the config files present in /etc/xdg/luakit

There are several files of interest:

• 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 <code>, 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.

Just copy the files you wish to change (and the rc.lua) into $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/luakit (defaults to ~/.config/luakit/) and luakit will use those files when you next launch it.

Uninstall

To delete luakit from your system run:

sudo make uninstall

If you installed with a custom prefix remember to add the identical prefix here also, example:

sudo make PREFIX=/usr uninstall

Reporting Bugs

Please use the bug tracker at:

http://luakit.org/projects/luakit/issues

Community

Mailing list

Subscribe to the development mailing list here:

http://lists.luakit.org/mailman/listinfo/luakit-dev

Or view the archives at:

http://lists.luakit.org/archive/luakit-dev/

IRC

Join us in #luakit on the irc.oftc.net network.