 In the browser space, there's not a ton of competition, there's not a ton of innovation. When you talk about browsers, you really have two choices. You have Chrome or Chrome-based browsers, which basically means they're all exactly the same. They have maybe some different UI elements, but for the most part, it's Chrome. Or you have Firefox, in which case you're running the Gecko engine and you are using an open source browser and you have all the problems that go along with that along with all the benefits. Which way you go, it doesn't really matter, you're still going to be browsing the same internet for the most part, but one of the things that has kind of fallen by the wayside over the last 10 years is innovation in this space. So whenever I see a different browser that I've never tried before, I decide I want to try it. So today, we're going to be taking a look at a browser called the VIEB. And what this is and what it aims to be is a keyboard-centric browser similar to Qt browser. And it also aims to be a command-based browser similar to what you'd get with something like VIM. Although VIM obviously is not a browser, but you have a command system like insert mode, command mode, search mode, things like that. And that's what VIEB does. It has different modes that you can use to navigate and use the browser. So that's what we're going to take a look at today. Now the first thing you should know before you continue on with this video at all is that this browser is an electron-based application. So some of you out there, that's just going to make you turn tail and run away. I'm kind of on that train as well. But I've used it now for a couple of days and the memory usage hasn't been bad. And one thing you have to know is that memory usage for all browsers is bad. Let me check my Firefox browser right now. Yeah, that's what I thought. I'm using a crap ton of memory in terms of Firefox right now. So memory usage isn't great no matter what. So I wasn't really all that worried about memory usage when it comes to VIEB because it's an electron-based app. There are other downsides to electron. Sometimes it runs slower. Sometimes it has CPU spikes. I haven't really noticed any of that stuff. For the most part, VIEB has been very fast for me and or at least it has been fast enough. I haven't noticed it being so slow that it's noticeable. So for example, if you've ever used surf, you'll know that surf is one of the slowest browsers ever. It's the suckless browser. It's not meant to be fast. It's meant to be suckless. VIEB isn't anything like that. It was plenty fast enough. So let's go ahead and actually take a look at this thing. So when you get into it, this is what you'll come up with first. Now, obviously you won't have any of the other tabs open that I have open, but you're going to be welcomed with the help screen. And I highly recommend you go through the documentation. This documentation is actually quite long. As you can see, it's all one big page, but there's just a ton of stuff here. Obviously you can't read any of that as I'm scrolling too fast. But you can see that there's a ton of documentation. And I have to say right off the bat, the documentation was really good. Sometimes you get to a project and it's a very interesting project and you want to use it for a while, but then you go search out the documentation and it's meh. This is not like that. There's a ton of stuff here, but they also do a good job of filtering out the things that really matter. So for example, you need to know exactly how to navigate the essentials. So it tells you about the modes and then it tells you the basic key bindings that you have to know. D to open up a new tab, like so, D to close a new tab, like so, switch between tabs with W and B, W, B, W, B, W, B, and so on and so forth. Reopen tabs with you, refresh tabs with R, open the help with F1 and quit with ZZ. So those are all basic key bindings that you'll have to know. Now, once you get past those essential key bindings, they do have a cheat sheet that you can use. You just scroll down here a little bit and it'll show you all the key bindings that you'll actually have to know. And this is similar to what you'd probably see with Key Browser. Key Browser has one of these cheat sheets and in fact, I'm pretty sure they look exactly the same. So you'll want to keep this available. So you'll want to remember that F1 key binding so that you can get to help when you need to find a key binding. So one of the things that's cool, and Key Browser does this as well, is when you press a letter, you'll actually get a kind of a little, you probably miss it. It doesn't stay up for very long. If you see up here, there's a like a helper and it'll tell you all the things that you can press after that in order to get to the whatever functionality you're looking for. I wish that little helper would stay up a little bit longer, quite honestly. Because sometimes, I mean, if you press that and you got a, it's gone. It's gone. It's gone. You know, so if that, if that just stayed up there just a tiny fraction longer, you know, didn't go away at all until you pressed another key, that'd be way better. So let's now go ahead and talk about the mode. So one of the first modes you'll see here that they tell you about is the command mode. And you enter command mode similar to what you do with them by hitting the colon key. And then you set settings using the set command. So if you wanted to use set, add blocker, for example, like this, if you can actually spell like it, and you wanted to make it so that always use a updated version of the host file, you could do this, and you set that and it'll tell you that it's done the thing that it needs to do down here now. Now, one of the things you'll need to keep in mind is that if you make any settings here inside the browser, those settings will only stay in effect for this session of the browser. Once you close it and come back, that setting will go away. The only way you can actually get past that limitation is by running mkvi ebrc. And what that will do is it'll write all of the change settings to your vbarc file. If you want to write all of the settings, including the default settings, you then add the word full after that. And then it would take your settings, combine them with the default settings that are still applicable and write those to a file. Then you could close the file, the browser, come back, and you would find that the settings that you have changed are also still, you know, there. If you want to see all the settings that you can change with within the command mode, you just hit this link here, and you can scroll down here and it'll actually show you all of the things that you can do with the settings within Veeb. So you can change things like that blocker, what the cache behavior, what the browser does with cookies and stuff upon quit upon download completions, so on and so forth. There's just a ton of stuff here. It goes on for quite a while. And I like I said at the beginning, I highly recommend going through this documentation because there's a lot of different things you can do with containers with theming with the modes themselves, how icons and favicons behave, how tabs behave, how the browser looks, just a ton of different stuff here. And obviously I can't go through all of them. So I highly recommend just going through this list here and, you know, figuring out things that you want to kind of tweak. Now, the other modes, the Explorer mode is probably the most important mode that you'll see because unlike keep browser where you'd press like the O key to open up a new URL or a new tab or something in Veeb, you use E first that gets into into the Explorer mode. And then you can go to do something like YouTube.com or whatever, wherever you want to go to the URL, or do a search. If you wanted to use search and defaults to duck duck go. And you use that in order to navigate the web. That's why it's called the Explorer mode. And you'll use it a lot. That's by far the mode that you'll use the most. The other modes are search. So you hit slash in order to search for something. So we know beast is on this list. And I'll show you then the instances of the word beast on the page. And you navigate that just like you would have them small end goes forward. Big end goes backwards. Okay. The other things that you need to know. So if we use shift H, they'll actually take us back to where we were. I mean, GG up to the top. The last one that you'll probably want to take a look at is called visual mode. Now, I personally don't think it's all that useful simply because I have a mouse. But if you are on a device that doesn't have a mouse or you're really seriously dedicated to never ever using your mouse in the browser, like absolutely never wanting to use your mouse, the visual mode could come in handy. So by pressing V, what you're going to get is a little cursor on the screen. You see this little cursor underneath my mouse cursor. It's blinking colors. You can navigate the page then using your Vim keys. And what that will do is you can move up and down the page and then you can hover over a link or whatever to enter and I'll actually take you to that link. Now, there is another thing about them mode that you could possibly use is if you hit the V again and then scroll down, you see how it's highlighting text that's similar to what them does in visual mode. It's great for if you wanted to then yank that text, you could do that it would yank that text if you wanted to copy it. Like I said, personally, I don't think that that mode is all that useful simply because I don't mind using the mouse inside the browser every once in a while. But I could see if you are one of those people who are using the absolute correct purist way, you'd want to avoid using the mouse all the time or at all. You could just use the the keyboard visual mode would then be a lot more useful. Now the last mode we should talk about is the follow mode. So basically, if you press F, this is similar to what you would see in key browser or other keyboard based browsers, where if you press F, it will give you some letters on the screen. You press that letter, and it will follow that link. That's what follow mode basically does. So those are the modes. In terms of actual navigation, a lot of the same stuff that you'd find in Vim applies to this. So gg to go to the top, big g to go to the bottom, d to close a tab. And I believe it is you to reopen a tab. Yep. And so that's basically undo if you remember in Vim, obviously with the search and stuff is still the same as you would see. So slash in order to search and get into like search mode. And it's also just as customizable as them in terms of key binding and stuff. So you can use the colon map command in order to, if one of the key bindings doesn't work for you, you can just set it to something different, exactly the same as you would in Vim. Let's take a quick look at the V barc file. Now remember, this is not created as far as I'm aware by default, that actually didn't check before I set it, but it does get created if you run that make V barc command inside of the the browser itself. And this is what it looks like. If you do make V barc full, it actually will do all the default settings as well. So you can set the font size, you can do all the stuff. Now there's just a ton of stuff here. And for the most part, it's just basically the same commands as you'd use in command mode inside the browser, you set then the setting that you want to do. And some of those have keys, settings that you can then set after that. So for example, add brought ad blocker equals update would then set the host file to always update instead of waiting for a new VB update. A lot of these have the same thing. So they have permission pointer lock equals block. They have mouse visual mode equal on switch and so on and so forth. Honestly, I would set the brow, I would set the settings inside the browser because you would have more indication of what those settings do right there. Unless you know absolutely what you're doing, I would leave this alone and then just write to this file as you make those changes inside the browser. That's what I've been doing. And it just seems to be easier. It also is easier to remember the settings that you can change because if we go back to the browser here and do get into command mode and set, it'll actually tell you all the settings that you can change and you can actually scroll down and use your mouse or using the them keys or whatever you want. And then you don't have to remember what these things are called. And if there's one obviously that you don't know, you can go back to the help page and find out what those things are using the search mode in order to search the thing that you need to remember. So I could probably spend another 20 minutes or so talking about the because I actually find it really nice. Now, one thing I should talk about is ad blocking. So I'm one of the reasons why I can't use cute browser as my daily driver is because cute browsers ad blocking is is bad, like it's really, really bad. And I'm not just talking about video ads, like most non extension based ad blockers are bad when it comes to blocking video ads. I understand that I can get past it using MPV or whatever and keep browser. It was fine. But with like cute browser, some of the stuff in like actual web pages, like when it blocked an ad, the web page would actually break. Like it would look weird. One of the things I haven't noticed with the is that problem. So in regular websites, like if you want to say Gizmodo here, if we go back to the browser here like this, you can see that is blocked all the advertisements and it hasn't really broken the website. And so it looks really nice. The same thing, for example, with the verge, which is notorious for their like full page ads, and it blocks those just as well. Here's, you know, it does very good. The one thing that you won't hear me talking about, though, is video ads. It doesn't even try as far as I'm aware to block video ads like on YouTube. So if you were looking forward to not having video ads to this, it's not going to happen. It's a little disappointing, but not surprising to me at all. That stuff is really hard to block. I'm not actually sure how you block origin even does it. But there's no blocking of video ads here as far as I can tell at all. So honestly, I'm quite impressed with the ad blocking, because like I said, a lot of times with these smaller browsers, when you they do have ad blocking, they block the ads just fine. But the website kind of gets messed up. I haven't noticed that at all at all in Vib. So that is Vib. I I don't think it's going to get me to switch away from Firefox. Quite honestly, first of all, it would definitely take quite a bit of effort to set up over the last few days. There has been several settings that I've had to, you know, set in order to get it to be the way I wanted to set. And I'm sure if I use it even longer, there'd be more and more settings over time that I would do. Now, that's not a big deal. It's more of a matter of willingness to give that effort. At the moment, I'm just kind of not. Also, I like Firefox now. I'm sure eventually Firefox will do something that pisses me off. And maybe Vib then will be an option for me right now. I'm happy with Firefox. But I can see for people who are interested in a more keyboard based browser that aren't really interested in using Firefox. This is an option. Now, it just is another chromium based browser. It's not anything special. It's not their own web engine or anything like that. So if you're looking for something unique, it's not that at least in terms of the actual underlining technology. And also you have to deal with the electron thing over my two days of using it, the electron thing didn't really end up bothering me as much as I thought it would. But again, it's something to keep in mind. So that is Vib. If you have comments about this browser, you can leave those in the comments section below. I really do appreciate everybody who leaves a comment. If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you hit the red button. I really do appreciate everybody who has subscribed. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. I'd like to thank my current patrons, Robert Sid, Devon Patrick, Fred Kramer, Megalyn Jackson, and I can tool Steve A. Sabragalynix, Garrick, Samuel, KB, TGV, Keith, Mitchell J. Doug, Carbon Data, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Marnie, Andy, Ross, Eduardo, Merrick, Kent, Joshua Lee, Peter, a Crucible, Dark Benedict Times, and PM. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.