surf is a

minimalist In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post– World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Do ...

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

developed by suckless.org. The

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

of this browser does not include any graphical control elements; it is controlled via

keyboard shortcuts computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or ...

or external tools, which may manipulate its behavior by setting its window's properties.

Features

surf is intentionally limited in its set of features. The only graphical elements the browser has are the page view itself and, optionally, the scrollbars. The main functionality of the browser is implemented in third-party WebKitGTK library, and the rest of the program only provides a window and a set of XProperties to control its behavior. While surf supports

cookies A cookie is a baked or cooked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chi ...

, it does not include some other common features of web browsers such as

tabbed browsing In interface design, a tab is a graphical user interface object that allows multiple documents or panels to be contained within a single window, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching between sets of documents. It is an interface s ...

bookmark A bookmark is a thin marking tool, commonly made of card, leather, or fabric, used to keep track of a reader's progress in a book and allow the reader to easily return to where the previous reading session ended. Alternate materials for boo ...

s or

ad filtering Ad blocking or ad filtering is a software capability for blocking or altering online advertising in a web browser, an application or a network. This may be done using browser extensions or other methods. Technologies and native countermeasures ...

, though all can be implemented with patches, scripts or external programs, with instructions available in surf's homepage. Instead of an

address bar In a web browser, the address bar (also location bar or URL bar) is the element that shows the current URL. The user can type a URL into it to navigate to a chosen website. In most modern browsers, non-URLs are automatically sent to a search eng ...

, the _SURF_URI XProperty has to be set to user-requested

uniform resource locator A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifi ...

(''URL'') for the browser to follow it. By default, surf's configuration includes a

keyboard shortcut computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or ...

for calling the

dmenu dwm is a minimalist dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed by Suckless that has influenced the development of several other X window managers, including xmonad and awesome. It is externally similar to wmii, but internall ...

program to prompt the user for a URL. Most configuration of surf is performed by editing its configuration

header file Many programming languages and other computer files have a directive, often called include (sometimes copy or import), that causes the contents of the specified file to be inserted into the original file. These included files are called copybooks ...

in its

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

, and then (re)

compiling In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

it. Some settings can be changed without recompiling, via

command line arguments A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

or hotkeys.

References

External links

* {{web browsers 2010 software Free software programmed in C Free web browsers POSIX web browsers Software based on WebKit Web browsers that use GTK Software using the MIT license

Features

See also

References

External links