qutebrowser

qutebrowser is a keyboard-focused web browser based on Python and PyQt5.

Installation

Install either the qutebrowser or qutebrowser-git^AUR package.

Basic usage

Use : to access the command prompt. You can use Tab to auto-complete.

On first usage of qutebrowser, a Quickstart page appears. It is later accessible via :help. See the cheatsheet for keyboard shortcuts.

User configuration

qutebrowser can be configured via the UI, the qutebrowser command-line or a Python script. qutebrowser's own documentation explains in detail how to configure qutebrowser with these different methods. To open qutebrowser's help system, type :help. On the help page, choose Configuring qutebrowser.

To find out the paths where the configuration files will be located, open the special page qute://version. On Arch Linux, this will typically be $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/qutebrowser/. The configuration made in qutebrowser will be stored in autoconfig.yml (which should not be touched by the user) while the user's Python script is config.py.

Configuration in qutebrowser

To set a single configuration item, you can simply type :set followed by the name of the configuration item and the new value that you would like to set. For example, you could type

:set auto_save.session true

to open your previous tabs when you reopen qutebrowser.

To open qutebrowser's UI settings page, type

:set

without further arguments. There, you can edit the different settings in the UI. When you are finished, type :set again to store your configuration.

For example, under url.searchengines you can configure your search engines which are stored as a list of key-value pairs. When you have not changed this setting yet, this should look something like

{"DEFAULT": "https://duckduckgo.com/?q={}"}

This configures DuckDuckGo as your default search engine while the placeholder {} will be replaced by your search term. To add a shortcut for quickly searching the Arch Linux wiki, you could use

{"DEFAULT": "https://duckduckgo.com/?q={}", "wa": "https://wiki.archlinux.org/?search={}"}

Then, as described by the comment in the qutebrowser UI, you can search the Arch Linux wiki by typing o wa <searchterm>. Notice that the arguments required to perform a search vary across search engines. For example, to set up Google, use https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q={}. Or to set up Brave Search, use https://search.brave.com/search?q={}.

If Tor is installed and running on your system and you wish to use DuckDuckGo onion page instead, the setting should be something like

{"DEFAULT": "https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/?q={}", "wa": "https://wiki.archlinux.org/?search={}"}

Keybindings

You can edit the keybindings directly from the browser with the command :bind key command or you can edit them directly from the file. Notice that there are many, many keybinds already in place. If you notice a lag on one of your keybind it is because some other keybind is also starting with the same key.

See the documentation for examples.

Video playback

See Browser plugins#Multimedia playback.

Alternatively you can add an option in your config.py to open a video in mpv, in the following example pressing Ctrl+/ will bring up all the available video links on the page, then simply press the corresponding key combination for the video link you require and it will open it up in mpv

config.py

...
config.bind('<Ctrl+/>', 'hint links spawn --detach mpv {hint-url}')
...

Tips and tricks

Importing quickmarks/bookmarks

Qutebrowser supports importing bookmarks from several formats via the python script /usr/share/qutebrowser/scripts/importer.py. The default output format is qutebrowser's quickmarks format. For a short explanation of the differences between bookmarks and quickmarks see the qutebrowser FAQ.

From Chromium/Chrome

Run the script mentioned above specifying chromium as the first argument and the directory containing the bookmarks file as the second argument. For Chromium this is ~/.config/chromium/Default and ~/.config/google-chrome/Default for Chrome. The output of the script can be appended to ~/.config/qutebrowser/quickmarks. Some of the input formats are explained below. Additional information can be found by supplying the -h flag to importer.py.

$ python /usr/share/qutebrowser/scripts/importer.py chromium ~/.config/chromium/Default >> ~/.config/qutebrowser/quickmarks

From Firefox

Export Firefox bookmarks to an an HTML file (see [1]). Then, use the script to import.

$ python /usr/share/qutebrowser/scripts/importer.py bookmarks.html >> ~/.config/qutebrowser/quickmarks

From bookmarks.html file

The import from a bookmarks.html file requires the package python-beautifulsoup4. To import you just supply your bookmarks.html file to importer.py and append the output to ~/.config/qutebrowser/quickmarks.

$ python /usr/share/qutebrowser/scripts/importer.py ~/.config/chromium/Default >> ~/.config/qutebrowser/quickmarks

Import as bookmarks instead of quickmarks

You can use any of the above mentioned methods and supply an additional -b flag to change the output format of the script to bookmarks. The output should then be appended to ~/.config/qutebrowser/bookmarks/urls.

$ python /usr/share/qutebrowser/scripts/importer.py -b chromium ~/.config/chromium/Default >> ~/.config/qutebrowser/bookmarks/urls

Note that the flag must be added before the browser specification.

Automatically enter login information

You can use the qute-pass userscript to automatically enter login information stored in your Pass password-store. You will need a dmenu-compatible application launcher and python-tldextract. Set up a keybinding which executes :spawn --userscript qute-pass.

This article or section needs language, wiki syntax or style improvements. See Help:Style for reference.

Reason: The quote should be part of the userscript's --help page if it is so prominent. (Discuss in Talk:Qutebrowser)

To quote from the script's description:

The domain of the site has to appear as a segment in the pass path, for example: "github.com/cryzed" or "websites/github.com". How the username and password are determined is freely configurable using the CLI arguments. The login information is inserted by emulating key events using qutebrowser's fake-key command in this manner: [USERNAME]<Tab>[PASSWORD], which is compatible with almost all login forms.

To further clarify, the pass-structure that is used by default should look something like this:

 user@computer$ pass

 Password Store 
 ├── example.site1.com 
 │   └── username 
 ├── example.site2.com 
 │   └── username1 
 │   └── username2

This means is that each website is a directory in your ~/.password-store folder. Within each website-named directory is where the files are titled username.gpg, username2.pgp, etc. and each file contains the password associated with each username for the website. For those of you migrating from Firefox, a modified version of firefox_decrypt should migrate things in this format.

The userscript provides many options to accomodate most workflows and special circumstances (such as only wanting to insert the password or the regular method of inserting the username and password not working).

Turn on spell checking

First, download the appropriate dictionary using the dictcli.py script that comes bundled with qutebrowser.

For example, for English (US):

$ /usr/share/qutebrowser/scripts/dictcli.py install en-US

The script has other features too, which can be shown by using --help.

Then set the following in qutebrowser:

:set spellcheck.languages ["en-US"]

Minimize fingerprinting

Websites may be able to identify you based on combining information on screen size, user-agent, HTTP_ACCEPT headers, and more. See [2] for more information and to test the uniqueness of your browser. Below are a few steps that can be taken to make your qutebrowser installation more "generic".

Additionally see Firefox/Privacy#Configuration for more ideas.

Set a common user-agent

Several user agents are available as options when using set content.headers.user_agent. Another, possibly more generic user-agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Note:

You may want to change Windows NT 10.0 by X11; Linux x86_64, since websites can also gather your platform type via Javascript, and this setting cannot be changed in qutebrowser.
Changing your user-agent away from the default will prevent some websites from working properly. For example, CAPTCHA will mention your browser is not supported if the user agent is listed as an out-of-date browser.

Set a common HTTP_ACCEPT header

The following is a common HTTP_ACCEPT header (Firefox default). Simply type the following commands at the prompt

set content.headers.accept_language en-US,en;q=0.5
set content.headers.custom '{"accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8"}'

Disable reading from canvas

set content.canvas_reading false

Note: Some websites depend on canvas reading for content rendering and other functionality. Adding this option may cause them to not work properly [3].

Disable WebGL

Set content.webgl to false to disable WebGL.

dwb-like session handling

To have qutebrowser handle sessions more like in dwb with the --restore option (multiple simultaneously active sessions), you can use this wrapper script. It uses --basedir to separate data, cache and runtime for each session, while keeping the configuration shared.

Disable websites

Create ~/.config/qutebrowser/blocked-hosts and enter websites you want to block in each line; www.youtube.com for example. This will keep the built-in adblock list while adding the websites in. Restart qutebrowser, and run :adblock-update.

Enable Brave browser adblocker

Install the python-adblock package and enable the adblocker within qutebrowser:

:set content.blocking.method both

Open some links in mpv

To open some specific links in mpv (like YouTube, reddit, etc) instead of loading the webpage. This can be used to bypass ads, tracking, etc. You can of course replace mpv by the video player of your choice.

:bind M hint links spawn mpv {hint-url}

Enable darktheme everywhere

:set colors.webpage.darkmode.enabled true

Disable javascript

:set content.javascript.enabled false

Route the traffic through tor

This requires tor to be enabled and running. Note this is only using the tor proxy but does not provide you any protection from fingerprinting you might have on tor browser.

:set content.proxy socks://localhost:9050/

Change the context menu theme

To change the context menu theme, find the relevant section of your config.py and set the appropriate settings. For example:

config.py

...
c.colors.contextmenu.disabled.fg = '#808080'
c.colors.contextmenu.menu.bg = '#353535'
c.colors.contextmenu.menu.fg = '#ffffff'
c.colors.contextmenu.selected.bg = '#909090'
...

Integrate with KeePassXC

Qutebrowser ships with qute-keepassxc for integration with KeePassXC.

To integrate with KeePassXC:

Enable KeepassXC-Browser extensions in your KeepassXC config.
From KeePassXC go to Tools->Settings->Browser Integration, and check "Enable browser integration".
Make sure to have a working private-public-key-pair in your GPG keyring.
Find your secret keys with gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format=long. The key must be trusted, e.g. it should contain "[ultimate]" in the "uid" field.
If it is not trusted, you can trust it with gpg --edit-key KEYID, then trust, 5 (ultimate trust) and confirm.
Finally, copy the key id.
Install the package python-pynacl
Adapt your qutebrowser config.
You can e.g. add the following lines to your ~/.config/qutebrowser/config.py. Remember to replace `ABC1234` with your actual GPG key id.

config.py

config.bind('<Alt-Shift-u>', 'spawn --userscript qute-keepassxc --key ABC1234', mode='insert')
config.bind('pw', 'spawn --userscript qute-keepassxc --key ABC1234', mode='normal')

To manage multiple accounts you also need rofi installed.

Troubleshooting

Unreadable tooltips

Depending on your Qt theme, tooltips might be hard to read. In order to fix this, create a Qt Style Sheet file. For example:

~/.local/share/qutebrowser/fix-tooltips.qss

QToolTip {
	background-color: palette(highlight);
	border: 2px solid palette(highlight);
	color: palette(text);
}

Then load the style sheet when launching qutebrowser:

qutebrowser --qt-arg stylesheet ~/.local/share/qutebrowser/fix-tooltips.qss

Note: The style sheet will not be applied if there is an instance of qutebrowser already running.

Tip: You can use a desktop entry to create a convenient launcher when specifying extra arguments, such as in this instance.

See the bug report for details.

The bug report offers another method using qt5ctl that does not require arguments at launch:

In qutebrowser, :set qt.force_platformtheme qt5ctl
In qt5ct, set style: gtk2, standard dialogs: gtk2, palette: default
Change to Style Sheets tab, and create a new file (I called it tooltip-gtk2.qss but it should not matter)

Put the following contents inside:

QToolTip{
	background: QLinearGradient(x1: 0, y1: 0, x2: 0, y2: 0, stop: 0 palette(window), stop: 1 palette(alternate-window));
	border-radius: 3px;
	border: 1px solid #000000;
	padding: 1px;
	color: palette(text);
}

Click Save then Ok
Make sure to check the box next to this new file so that it will be applied to the theme
Click Apply