Luakit

luakit is a fast, light and simple to use micro-browser framework extensible by Lua using the WebKit web content engine and the GTK+ toolkit.

This is a fork of the original luakit based on the newer WebKit2 web engine, which is under active development. Note that the older WebKit1 and web browsers based upon WebKit1 are insecure and will not be fixed: see here for more details.

Don't Panic!

You don't have to be a developer to use luakit on a daily basis. If you are familiar with vimperator, pentadactyl, jumanji, uzbl & etc you will find luakit behaves similarly out of the box.

Requirements

• GTK+ 3
• Lua 5.1 or LuaJIT 2
• lfs (lua file system)
• webkit2gtk
• sqlite3

Compiling

To compile the stock luakit run:

make

To link against LuaJIT (if you have LuaJIT installed) run:

make USE_LUAJIT=1

To build with a custom compiler run:

make CC=clang

Note to packagers: you may wish to build luakit with:

make DEVELOPMENT_PATHS=0

To prevent luakit searching in relative paths (./config & ./lib) for user configs.

The USE_LUAJIT=1, PREFIX=/path, DEVELOPMENT_PATHS=0, CC=clang build options do not conflict. You can use whichever you desire.

Installing

To install luakit run:

sudo make install

The luakit binary will be installed at:

/usr/local/bin/luakit

And configs to:

/etc/xdg/luakit/

And the luakit libraries to:

/usr/local/share/luakit/lib/

To change the install prefix you will need to re-compile luakit (after a make clean) with the following option:

make PREFIX=/usr
sudo make PREFIX=/usr install

Use Luakit

Just run:

luakit [URI..]

Or to see the full list of luakit launch options run:

luakit -h

Configuration

The configuration options are endless, the entire browser is constructed by the config files present in /etc/xdg/luakit

There are several files of interest:

• rc.lua -- is the main config file which dictates which and in what order different parts of the browser are loaded.
• binds.lua -- defines every action the browser takes when you press a button or combination of buttons (even mouse buttons, direction key, etc) and the browser commands (I.e. :quit, :restart, :open, :lua <code>, etc).
• theme.lua -- change fonts and colours used by the interface widgets.
• window.lua -- is responsible for building the luakit browser window and defining several helper methods (I.e. w:new_tab(uri), w:close_tab(), w:close_win(), etc).
• webview.lua -- is a wrapper around the webview widget object and is responsible for watching webview signals (I.e. "key-press", "load-status", "resource-load-started", etc). This file also provides several window methods which operate on the current webview tab (I.e. w:reload(), w:eval_js("code here.."), w:back(), w:forward()).
• modes.lua -- manages the modal aspect of the browser and the actions that occur when switching modes.
• globals.lua -- change global options like scroll/zoom step, default window size, useragent, search engines, etc.

Just copy the files you wish to change (and the rc.lua) into $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/luakit (defaults to ~/.config/luakit/) and luakit will use those files when you next launch it.

Uninstall

To delete luakit from your system run:

sudo make uninstall

If you installed with a custom prefix remember to add the identical prefix here also, example:

sudo make PREFIX=/usr uninstall

Reporting Bugs

Please use the bug tracker at:

https://github.com/aidanholm/luakit/issues

Community for the original luakit

Mailing list

Subscribe to the development mailing list here:

http://lists.luakit.org/mailman/listinfo/luakit-dev

Or view the archives at:

http://lists.luakit.org/archive/luakit-dev/

IRC

Join us in #luakit on the irc.oftc.net network.