Show HN: Chawan TUI web browser
22 comments
·June 16, 2025silasdb
Wonderful! Thanks!
I see you don't use termcap/ncurses anymore. Do you perform terminal handling yourself directly?
Thanks again!
isaacvando
This is super cool! Bravo. Awesome to see it written in Nim too.
When I do `cha example.com` I can't figure out how to use any of the commands (hjkl, etc). The only keys I've found that have any effect are typing numbers which show up in the bottom left. Haven't figured out how to do anything with those. Am I missing something obvious about how to use this or could this be a bug?
I built from source on MacOS Sequoia 15.5 Apple Silicon using Nim 2.24. Pages load correctly, I just can't get the commands to work. Thanks!
isaacvando
I tried it in Ghostty, iTerm2, and Terminal.app and they all behaved the same.
shiomiru
It's a bug, thanks for reporting. I've created a ticket: https://todo.sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/63
Could you please pull the macos-input branch from https://git.sr.ht/~bptato/chawan and report back on what the `a` file includes after opening a site and typing some commands? (Should be created in the current working directory.)
isaacvando
Here's the contents of a. Let me know if there are any other commands you'd like me to type.
``` handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c 'j' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c 'j' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104c5b780"j" c 'j' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c 'k' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c 'k' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104ca8b70"k" c 'k' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c 'l' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c 'l' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104c5bab0"l" c 'l' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c 'k' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c 'k' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104ca8d20"k" c 'k' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c 'j' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c 'j' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104c5b480"j" c 'j' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c 'h' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c 'h' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104ca89c0"h" c 'h' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c 'g' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c 'g' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104cae780"g" c 'g' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '1' after handleCommandInput, buffer "" c '1' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '2' after handleCommandInput, buffer "" c '2' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '3' after handleCommandInput, buffer "" c '3' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '1' after handleCommandInput, buffer "" c '1' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '2' after handleCommandInput, buffer "" c '2' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '2' after handleCommandInput, buffer "" c '2' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '3' after handleCommandInput, buffer "" c '3' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '\3' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c '\3' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104cae690"\3" c '\3' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '\3' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c '\3' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104adaed0"\3" c '\3' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '\3' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c '\3' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104ca8720"\3" c '\3' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '\4' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c '\4' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104bf8d80"\4" c '\4' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '\3' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c '\3' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104caaa80"\3" c '\3' handleCommandInput 1, buffer "" c '\4' handleCommandInput 2, buffer "" c '\4' after handleCommandInput, buffer 0x104ca8e40"\4" c '\4' ```
greenspam
Finally a good tool to view HN in terminal. Thank you! Where can I find the keyboard shortcuts? I can move with vim key binding, but can go back.
shiomiru
cha-config(5) or about:chawan. The former also has an online version: https://chawan.net/doc/cha/config.html#pager-actions
For navigation in particular you'd use capital D to discard the current buffer and return to the previous page. There's also , (comma, back) and . (period, forward), which non-destructively cycle through the stack.
(Well, it's really a tree, but the UI mostly treats it as a stack.)
greenspam
Thank you so much!
ijustlovemath
My jaw dropped when HN loaded first try from Termux! Nice work!
shiomiru
Thanks :)
If you're interested, I posted a user style for HN here: https://lists.sr.ht/~bptato/chawan-devel/%3CD9S40OS2QWHL.PXQ...
Mainly just to fix the vote arrows, because for now background-image only renders placeholders.
elcritch
I recommend perusing the code. Since it’s in Nim it’s pretty approachable (and performant). There’s still lots of gnarly bits like implementing HTML DOM and web specs, but it doesn’t take you days to grasp the basic setup.
lucideer
Absolutely incredible. And it even supports gopher.
mikeponders
Gotta love Nim
corv
Awesome and in Nim!
etaioinshrdlu
I rabbit-holed a little and apparently Chrome and Safari no longer even fully pass Acid2 and Acid3?
ataylor32
Here is a relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15256890
agumonkey
as a tiny web fan, it's lovely to see projects like these, *claps*
marcodiego
GPM support?
shiomiru
No GPM yet, but it does recognize XTerm's mouse protocol.
null
A terminal-based web browser in Nim.[1] Has acceptable (YMMV) CSS rendering, some JS support, and inline images (sixel/kitty). It can also use various protocols other than http(s) such as (s)ftp, gopher, gemini, ...
Chawan started out as a w3m clone, and the UI still resembles it. However, the architecture has turned out quite different, with pages loaded in separate processes, and protocol/file type handling separated out into external binaries. An interesting result is that you can even register decoders for custom inline image formats, although practical use cases of this are rather minimal.
There is a gallery showcasing some websites being rendered here: https://chawan.net/gallery/index.html
[1]: https://nim-lang.org