qbrsh

What is qbrsh? ​

qbrsh is a fast, keyboard-driven web browser written in Rust. It renders with WebKitGTK 6 on GTK 4 and is navigated entirely from the keyboard, in the spirit of qutebrowser, but built on a small, predictable core.

Why it exists ​

Most browsers assume a mouse. qbrsh assumes your hands stay on the home row: you follow links with letter hints, scroll with hjkl, manage tabs with single keys, and reach everything else through a : command line with fuzzy completion.

Under the hood it uses a hand-rolled Elm-style (TEA) architecture. All state lives in one owned value, every input becomes a message, and a single consumer applies those messages through a pure update function that returns effects. There is no shared mutable state, no re-entrancy, and no polling. The result is a browser that stays responsive and is straightforward to reason about.

What you get ​

  • Hint mode for following links, opening tabs, and yanking URLs by keyboard.
  • Modal input with Normal, Insert, Command, and Hint modes.
  • Tabs with open, close, undo-close, clone, move, and tab-only.
  • Fuzzy completion in the command line, backed by history, bookmarks, and quickmarks.
  • Native ad blocking at both the navigation and subresource level.
  • Per-site permissions for geolocation, notifications, and media.
  • A sandboxed Rune plugin runtime with cold-event hooks.
  • A JSON-RPC control socket for scripting the browser from any process.

What it is not ​

qbrsh does not run Firefox or Chrome extensions. Extensibility is native: ad blocking, userscripts-style plugins, and external automation over IPC. See Plugins and Automation.