Dillo: like a bat out of hell

I love text browsers. My favourite ones are lynx and elinks.
I love graphical browsers. My favourite ones are chromium and firefox.
I love browsers that somehow are in the middle like w3m-img or links2.

This is to say that I spend a lot of time surfing the web in different ways depending on what I need to achieve or the hardware I am using at the moment. It is not the same being connected to a powerful remote server or connected using an eeepc of 512mb of ram.

So instead of saying that I love them, it would be more accurate to say that I make an extensive use of all kinds of web browsers.

Among the graphical browsers I used to like was midori, it allowed me to do almost anything I could do with chromium but it needed less resources which was fine. The problem I have always had with midori is that I have often have to face one or other bug. In my eeepc everytime I scrolled down it opened a new tab and switched to it (oh man so annoying).

But thank god I discovered dillo. It is an incredibly fast graphical web browser that works like a charm in all my machines, especially in my less powerful ones, like the eeepc or any other old laptop/desktop machines.

Dillo has a certain number of limitations, that is true. It does not interpret javascript and therefore you lose a bit of some sites functionality. But this is a trade-off I am willing to accept.

Dillo has a number of configuration files under ~/.dillo that once tweaked will make your life way better. This is a list of the files you need to have in there:

* dillorc This is the actual config file. You can set many options here like the homepage, the colours you like...

* domainrc Dillo cross-domain request rules file. In this file you can configure which sites are allowed to retrieve data from third party domains.

* bm.txt The bookmarks file. You can add any bookmarks from the browser using its graphical interface, however the syntax is very easy and it is quicker to add your bookmarks directly to this file. For example:

:s1: Super cool sites
s1 http://www.chalsattack.com chalsattack
s1 http://blog.chalsattack.com/ chals' blog


* cookiesrc How to handle cookies. The syntax is also plain easy.
DEFAULT DENY
chalsattack.com ACCEPT
blog.chalsattack.com ACCEPT_SESSION

Note: Accepting cookies will create an additional cookies.txt file in ~/.dillo

Once everything is in place prepare to surf at full speed, be careful, you might get a ticket for speeding ;)

Now you can visit most sites on the web, check your mail and do almost anything you can do with other browsers. But you will not be able to for example watch videos or visit sites that exclusively depend on javascript.

Conclusion: The chalsattack.com version which was active from 2015 and 2016 made an extensive use of javascript, since I couldn't visit it with dillo, I re-wrote the site from scratch as you can read here

Next installment: a screenshot of dillo in action.

dotfiles

I have tried several methods of storing and making my dotfiles portable across different machines. There are dozens of excellent programs out there but somehow, I didn't really like any of them. Until my friend demure told me about GNU Stow.

Note: In debian, besides stow, there is a package called xstow which stands for (extended stow). They both work in a similar way.

GNU Stow is not meant to manage your dot files. The typical area of action of stow would be /usr/local  Its main usage is creating links to files in differnet parts of your filesystem so that you can try different versions of the same program (or at least this is what I understood from reading this article: Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles). 

And reading that article is precisely how I learnt to use it to create symbolic links to all my dot files while they are perfectly stored in my home in a directory named dotfiles.

The main reason why I like it so much is because Stow does something similar to what I used to do manually. The fact of finding a program that does all the hard work for you automatically is really great.

This is what I used to do before:

I had a dotfiles directory inside my Dropbox folder which synchronized across all my computers. Inside that dotfiles directory I had several files, but I'm going to use the typical .bashrc as an example.

In all my machines I made a symbolic link in my home directory named .bashrc to Dropbox/dotfiles/.bashrc This way all my computers read the same file as if the file was a real one. Make no mistake, the file did exist, but it was only a link after all.

In order to achieve this I had to type:

 $ ln -s ~/Dropbox/dotfiles/.bashrc ~/.bashrc

Whenever I made a new installation, I had to do the same for each of my dot files inside my dotfiles directory.

I do not know if you can imagine it, but my dotfiles directory was a little bit chaotic because there are many dot files that have their own dot folder so there were files with a dot, folders with a dot and files inside the dot folders.

What GNU Stow does for you:

With Stow you can keep all your dot files perfectly organized inside their own directory as long as they are inside ~/dotfiles And stow will make a symbolic link to all the right places where the files should go.

For example. You would place your .bashrc inside a directory named bash inside your dotfiles directory. Then you would only have to change to your dotfiles directory and type:

 $ cd ~/dotfiles
 $ stow bash

And be done with it. Isn't this an extraordinary thing?

Note: keep in mind that in debian you can also use xstow instead. It works exactly the same. Thus:

 $ cd ~/dotfiles
 $ xstow bash

Now comes the best part of all. So far my examples have only taken a single file (.bashrc) into account. But sure your dotfiles directory is full of both dot files and dot folders. If you had to go one by one it would be as hard as making the links manually. Well, with stow you can use wildcards to make your life easier.

For example, if you have in your dotfiles directory the following directories:

bash i3 cmus filezilla elinks mr nano gitconfig tmux mc ssh screen supertux

In order to create symbolic links to them all at the same time you can do:

 $ cd ~/dotfiles
 $ stow *

And be happy :)

One important consideration is that in each directory inside your dotfiles directory, you have to keep the skeleton structure of your dotfiles.So that stow knows where to place them. I recommend you take a look at the article I linked to above in order to understand it better.

Another important consideration is that I created a private git repository to use a version control system to keep track of changes to my files.