chawan

Text-mode web browser and terminal pager

TLDR

Open a website in the terminal browser

$ cha [example.org]

View a Markdown file

$ cha [README.md]

Dump a webpage to stdout in headless mode

$ cha -d [https://example.org]

Open in visual mode with the home page

$ cha -V

Pipe HTML content and specify its content type

$ cat [file.html] | cha -T text/html

Override a config option temporarily

$ cha -o display.color-mode=eight-bit [example.org]

SYNOPSIS

cha [options] [URL(s) or file(s)...]

Chawan (Japanese for "tea bowl") is a text-mode web browser and terminal pager with its own browser engine built from scratch in Nim. Despite being a terminal browser, it can display many websites with layout fidelity comparable to graphical browsers.
Features include HTML5 support with multiple encodings, a CSS layout engine supporting flow layout, tables, and flexbox, inline images via Sixel or Kitty graphics protocol (disabled by default), optional JavaScript via QuickJS (disabled by default), and multi-protocol support for HTTP(S), FTP, Gopher, Gemini, Finger, and Spartan. It uses vi(m)-like keybindings, supports mouse input, has a multi-process architecture with incremental document loading, and provides syscall sandboxing on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux.

PARAMETERS

-c, --css stylesheet

Temporarily append a CSS stylesheet to the user stylesheet.

-d, --dump

Headless mode; sequentially prints opened files to stdout. Implicitly enabled when stdout is not a tty.

-o, --opt config

Pass temporary TOML configuration options.

-r, --run script

Execute a JavaScript string or file; .mjs files run as ES modules.

-v, --version

Display version and exit.

-C, --config file

Override the default configuration file search path.

-I, --input-charset charset

Override input character set for all files.

-M, --monochrome

Force monochrome output.

-O, --output-charset charset

Override output character set.

-T, --type content-type

Override content type of all input files.

-V, --visual

Start in visual mode, opening the configured home page.

-h, --help

Print help and exit.

CONFIGURATION

TOML-based configuration searched in order: -C flag path, $CHA_DIR/config.toml, ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/chawan/config.toml, or ~/.chawan/config.toml.

CAVEATS

JavaScript and inline images are disabled by default and must be explicitly enabled. Requires a Unix-like OS (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, Haiku); Windows users must use WSL. Building from source requires the Nim compiler 2.0.0+, OpenSSL/LibreSSL, and libssh2.

HISTORY

Chawan was developed by bptato and is written in Nim. Inspired by w3m, it shares no code with it but has a similar UI and feature set. The current version is v0.3.3, licensed under the public domain (UNLICENSE). Available in Alpine Linux, Arch Linux (AUR), FreeBSD, Homebrew, NixOS, and Void Linux.