lariza

Lariza is a lightweight webkit2gtk browser, with low resource consumption, binary size and few dependencies. Lariza features tabbed browsing, custom user scripts, ad blocking and grep-like search functionality among other features. Furthermore, the user interface can be controlled entirely using keyboard shortcuts.

Installation

Lariza is available in the AUR as lariza^AUR and lariza-git^AUR. Alternatively, source code is available on Uninformativ which can be built using make.

Configuration

Environment variables

Below is a list of environment variables you can export in your shell's rc file, accompanied by their default values.

LARIZA_ACCEPTED_LANGUAGE=en-US
LARIZA_DOWNLOAD_DIR=/var/tmp
LARIZA_ENABLE_CONSOLE_TO_STDOUT=
LARIZA_FIFO_SUFFIX=/var/run/user/$UID/lariza.fifo-$LARIZA_FIFO_SUFFIX
LARIZA_HISTORY_FILE=
LARIZA_HOME_URI=about:blank
LARIZA_TAB_POS=top
LARIZA_TAB_WIDTH_CHARS=20
LARIZA_USER_AGENT=
LARIZA_ZOOM=1.0

Tip: For further information about what these variables change and what their possible values are, see man lariza

Config files

Lariza can be further configured by modifying the following files:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lariza/adblock
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lariza/certs
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lariza/scripts
$XDG_DATA_HOME/lariza/web_extensions
$XDG_CACHE_HOME/lariza
$XDG_CACHE_HOME/webkitgtk
$XDG_DATA_HOME/webkitgtk

Adblock

Support for blocking ads or URIs in general can be configured by creating $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lariza/adblock with regular expressions. Case-insensitive regexp and partial matches with glob wildcards are supported.

.*/ad/.*
.*/ads/.*
^https?://ad.*
^https?://advert.*
^https?://.*\.advertising\.com/

Note: In versions <21.01, the adblock file is located in ~/.config/lariza/adblock.black

User Scripts

After a page has been successfully loaded, the directory ~/.config/lariza/user-scripts will be scanned and each file in it ending with .js will be run as a JavaScript file in the context of said page.

Note: In versions <20.03, the scripts folder is located in ~/.config/lariza/scripts

Web Extensions

On startup, WebKit checks $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lariza/web_extensions for any .so files. For more information see this blog post.

Trusted certificates

You can add your own _self-signed) certificates in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lariza/certs

Keybindings

Custom keybindings can be added (and existing ones can be modified) by changing the browser.c file.

Examples

• You can change GDK_MOD1_MASK to GDK_CONTROL_MASK to change keybings using the ALt (Mod1) key to using Control.
• A keybind containing the line

 webkit_settings_set_enable_javascript(webkit_web_view_get_settings(WEBKIT_WEB_VIEW(c->web_view)), FALSE);

can be added to disable JavaScript.

Tip: When changing the default global modifier from Alt to Ctrl, make sure to change the keybind case GDK_KEY_c: /* reload trusted certs (left hand) */, to keep the clipboard copy shortcut Ctlr+c working.

Tip: The default MOD1+q (Close Window) and MOD1+w (Home) bindings can lead to unexpected window exits due to the proximity of the q and w keys to one another. Limit exposure to this by modifying GDK_KEY_q and/or GDK_KEY_w to suit.

Default key bindings

• Mod1+q close window
• Mod1+w home
• Mod1+e new tab
• Mod1+r reload
• Mod1+d download manager
• Mod1+2 search forward
• Mod1+n search forward
• Mod1+3 search backward
• Mod1+l location
• Mod1+k initiate search
• Mod1+c reload trusted certs
• Mod1+a go one tab to the left
• Mod1+s go one tab to the right
• F2 navigate forward
• F3 navigate backward

Tips and Tricks

Speed Dial home page

You can create a static/dynamic HTML page with a list of links to serve as a Speed Dial page to be called with the home page key binding. See Lariza Speed Dial Example for a sample static page.

Note: Set the Lariza home page environment variable accordingly: LARIZA_HOME_URI=file:///home/example/.config/lariza/bookmarks.html

Disabling JavaScript

Lariza enables JavaScript by default by passes through the default configuration of the underlying webkit2gtk engine. Disabling JavaScript requires rebuilding webkit2gtk with the -DENABLE_JIT=OFF variable set.

Warning: This will effectively disable JavaScript across all applications which depend on webkit2gtk.

As mentioned earlier, the line

webkit_settings_set_enable_javascript(webkit_web_view_get_settings(WEBKIT_WEB_VIEW(c->web_view)), FALSE);

can also be added to disable JavaScript. When doing this is recommended to also make keybindings to re-enable JavaScript when needed.

Using Lariza

lariza [-C] [URI ...]

• Disable cooperative instances

$ lariza -C

• Append Lariza with multiple URIs to open in separate tabs:

$ lariza archlinux.org duck.com example.org

• Prepend Lariza with environment variables to switch the default cache and local storage locations to /dev/null:

$ XDG_CACHE_HOME=/dev/null XDG_DATA_HOME=/dev/null lariza

Note: This does not disable cache or local storage. Instead, cache and local storage data are retained within volatile memory and cleared upon application exit.

• Improve upon the previous example by setting the configuration files directory to tmpfs and running the profile completely in memory:

$ XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/tmp XDG_CACHE_HOME=/dev/null XDG_DATA_HOME=/dev/null lariza

Note: XDG_CONFIG_HOME must mirror the file and directory structure of ~/.config whereby /tmp/lariza/keywordsearch is the equivalent of ~/.config/lariza/keywordsearch.

• Set Lariza to launch within a firejail sandbox using a spectrwm window manager key binding:

# ~/.spectrwm.conf 

program[lariza] = firejail lariza -C
bind[lariza] = Mod+l

For complete documentation, review the latest README and man pages available on the Lariza project page.