Brow6el: A full-featured web browser for the terminal using Chromium

7/23/2026 at 5:34:31 PM

I just don't understand...what is the use case of this? I thought it would be something that cleverly renders text without style in a minimalist-browser sort of way. But this just literally...shows you the web page...in the CLI? I'm confused.

by angeldimitrov94

7/23/2026 at 6:39:41 PM

I don't think any of these text-based web browsers are actively maintained;

"Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552

browsh-org/browsh: A fully-modern text-based browser, rendering to TTY and browsers https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh

"Forking Chrome to render in a terminal" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34547259

fathyb/carbonyl: Chromium running inside your terminal https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl

chawan: TUI Web Browser https://sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/

Ladybird browser may be easier to build a TUI terminal user interface for than other brothers because of Lagom FWIU (LibWeb and LibJs are already decoupled from the UI and rendering)

by westurner

7/23/2026 at 7:44:56 PM

I can't speak for the other projects you listed, but at least chawan is actively maintained by yours truly.

by shiomiru

7/23/2026 at 10:41:23 PM

My mistake! Lynx and elinks still work but don't exec JS or WASM.

Cloudflare Browser Isolation runs part of the browser in the cloud, which might work for TUIs ..

Research open source solutions for self-hosting remote browser isolation;

Like these browser isolation Chrome extensions: https://www.legba.app/blog/best-browser-isolation-extensions...

And these:

RBI: remote-browser-isolation · GitHub Topics https://github.com/topics/remote-browser-isolation?o=asc&s=u...

Cloudflare Browser Rendering REST API https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/rest-api... says 10/min day free (which is probably enough for an open source project that needs to run screenshots at various resolutions on a few builds per day)

But then there's this, which currently only execs partial js:

  elinks -dump -no-references -dump-width 79

by westurner

7/23/2026 at 6:06:21 PM

You could terminal into a remote machine terminal and use a web browser in the tty without needing an X11 windowing support.

by jadbox

7/23/2026 at 8:37:43 PM

Struggling to see the reasoning behind why you would need to do this if you are remoting into a machine, meaning you have a real machine that you can just open a browser in. Seems more like a solution looking for a problem to me.

There's never been a situation in which I wished I had a browser like this in the CLI.

There have been situations in which I wish I could just get a simplified text version of any site without the styling, but I never once wished I could see the actual full site in all its glory in the CLI.

by angeldimitrov94

7/23/2026 at 11:01:36 PM

Unless you have x-forwarding (and an X server running locally) or VNC you can't really use a graphical browser remotely yes?

This lets you use it from plain SSH connection?

by reddit_clone

7/24/2026 at 9:07:57 AM

In what situation do you need to do that is what the previous commenter qas getting at.

If you want a graphical browser just open it locally...

by jpc0

7/25/2026 at 9:46:25 AM

The primary idea was just can it be done. But it then went crazy, being mentioned on big portals such as hackaday, makeuseof, etc… I have also received messages people using this to access internal Grafana stack without need to be on VPN, so people found the reason for its existence by themselves. Also I am big fan of terminal apps, so why not.

by janantos

7/23/2026 at 5:08:13 PM

> WARNING: Kitty image support (currently only in main branch builds) by its design nature is barelly usable in SSH when brow6el runs on remote host, this feature is usable when brow6el is executed on localhost. On ssh the responsivenes of browser is significantly affected, due to massive data transfers on each frame rendered

But it's fine in the default Sixel?

by yjftsjthsd-h

7/25/2026 at 9:39:32 AM

Yes it is, I am testing it regularily, thats the reason I have implemented tailing rendering support in sixel renderer, to send only part of screen that has changed.

by janantos

7/23/2026 at 4:40:18 PM

I don't like the name. Can suggest renaming to insane browser because this is actually insane in a good way. :)

What happens if you run it in a TTY ? Does it fail to render anything?

by tim-projects

7/25/2026 at 9:41:02 AM

If you use yaft in tty it runs just fine except mouse, so you need to use keyboard mouse emulation I have inplemented for these and not only these scenarios.

by janantos

7/23/2026 at 4:58:04 PM

Can Brow6el work as expected within a Docker container?

by zarski

7/25/2026 at 9:49:24 AM

Docker is somehow problematic as it breaks somehow pty. but it works in distrobox, which is using containers, so there must be some parameters to make it run in docker. Another idea I had to mitigate it, was running ssh server using supervisord side by side

by janantos

7/23/2026 at 4:59:27 PM

Why were your projects no longer welcomed at Codeberg?

by leephillips

7/25/2026 at 9:31:15 AM

Tbh, I don’t want to be part of codeberg anymore, their community moved away from my believes. And as I have another projects being according them not welcomed there because they are tied to LLM ecosystem. I have prof of concept of AI coding agent entirely written in bash and also near realtime spoken word translation/transcription project using selfhosted Gemma4 and Nvidia Parakeet LLM models. In their latest blog they clearly stated those projects are not welcomed there, so I don’t see the reason to keep my projects there at all, how much I have understanding for their decision and I do believe that LLMs shall be used responsibly I don’t align myself with their community anymore and do not want to be part of it. I am more aligning with Linus Torvalds about LLMs opinions. From now Codeberg community is unpredictable.

by janantos

7/23/2026 at 5:05:47 PM

Codeberg recently changed policy to not allow primarily AI-authored projects.

by jdiff

7/23/2026 at 5:08:28 PM

Oh, I see. Well I won’t be installing this then.

by leephillips

7/23/2026 at 6:00:11 PM

If you were interested, check out Browsh. It's a similar project but based on Firefox and it's been around for quite some time now.

by jdiff

7/24/2026 at 4:13:41 AM

> Why were your projects no longer welcomed at Codeberg?

> Oh, I see. Well I won’t be installing this then.

> Very illuminating.

Man, talk about anti-social. What a bad faith question. It feels like you've already made up your mind on this. Were you actually looking for an answer, or just looking for an argument?

by CaptainFever

7/23/2026 at 7:33:25 PM

OK?

by GaryBluto

7/23/2026 at 5:42:24 PM

"This reporitory [https://tangled.org/janantos.tngl.sh/brow6el] is now the main and only source of truth, previous on Codeberg [https://codeberg.org/janantos/brow6el] is kept for referrence only. I have decided to migrated from Codeberg because of my other projects are not welcomed there anymore and I want to keep my projects together on single platform."

by mzs

7/23/2026 at 5:49:16 PM

Very illuminating.

by leephillips