2009.11.07: A huge makeover. The second phase in the life of uzbl

2009-11-07

For the last two months, Rob Manea and Mason Larobina have been doing truly awesome work giving uzbl a much needed makeover and today, all those changes should be ready for wider consumption. Various patches were also contributed by Barak P, Brendan T, David K, Maximilian G, Olivier S and yours truly. (authors file)

Hilights:

  • splitup and better separation of concerns: uzbl-core, uzbl-browser and uzbl-tabbed. Basically:
    • Uzbl-core is the old uzbl, minus the built-in event handling, and minus the keyboard interface. (statusbar is still there, but more flexible)
    • Uzbl-browser is a complete, "working out of the box" browser implementation based on uzbl-core and many of the scripts we already knew. It handles a lot of the events from uzbl-core, it also handles keyboard input, it updates the statusbar when appropriate, and also some more things.. (read on)
    • Uzbl-tabbed is the old uzbl-tabbed, but refactored to work with the new uzbl-browser. (note: this is not done yet. uzbl-tabbed is broken in this release, you'll have to wait a bit or try out jake's C++ tab manager)
    For more information, refer to the readme.
  • EM (event manager) instead of handlers : very finegrained, language agnostic way to handle events: anytime anything happens, uzbl-core emits a message on stdout and/or over a socketfile, so you can handle everything (or not) however you want. The only remaining handlers right now are cookie, download and scheme. On the long term we want to shift all of those to the events system, but then we'd need synchronous events..
  • Much better keybinds (support for special keys, everything is configurable, better Modkeys, more generic/flexible modes). Your old binding strings should be backwards compatible, but the way binds are defined is now different.
  • ability to add entries to the various context menus
  • print support
  • and much more
  • the website and docs have also had an overhaul to reflect these changes

I highly recommend you study the new sample config carefully. A lot of things have changed, and a lot of things are now possible which weren't before. Many of these things are now demonstrated in the sample config.

Also, if you were using many of the example scripts from the old uzbl, you probably now just want 'uzbl-browser'. It comes with all the scripts by default, so you can remove them all in your XDG* dirs (unless you want to override them).

PS: If you run uzbl on the commandline, you'll see a lot of 'Gtk-WARNING **: Ran out of links' messages. We haven't figured out yet what these are but they seem harmless.

Dieter