Nyxt: the Emacs-like web browser
Did you know...? LWN.net is a subscriber-supported publication; we rely on subscribers to keep the entire operation going. Please help out by buying a subscription and keeping LWN on the net.
Nyxt is an unusual web browser that tries to answer the question, "what if Emacs was a good web browser?". Nyxt is not an Emacs package, but a full web browser written in Common Lisp and available under the BSD three-clause license. Its target audience is developers who want a browser that is keyboard-driven and extensible; Nyxt is also developed for Linux first, rather than Linux being an afterthought or just a sliver of its audience. The philosophy (as described in its FAQ) behind the project is that users should be able to customize all of the browser's functionality.
Background
Nyxt was started in 2017 by John Mercouris, and is currently sponsored as a project by Atlas, which seems to be a two-person business focusing on Common Lisp development. The team consists of Mercouris and André A. Gomes. The post about Nyxt's origins states that it was built by Emacs users and developed to provide " a good Emacs experience while using the Internet ". It is meant to enable user freedom not only through its license, but also by focusing on the browser's " hackability " so users can fully control the browser:
Nyxt and Emacs take a different approach than Unix. Instead of doing one thing and doing it well, Nyxt and Emacs share a core foundation built upon extensibility. They are designed to be introspected, changed, and hacked on the fly.
With Emacs being a heavy influence on Nyxt, one might wonder why it isn't developed as an Emacs package or browser extension rather than as a standalone project. In 2021, contributor Pedro Delfino and Mercouris addressed that question in a blog post. In short, despite all of its merits, Mercouris felt that Emacs had too much technical debt to make a good basis for a web browser, and wanted to start with a clean slate. He also wanted to make Nyxt welcoming to non-Emacs users, which meant that it would be a bad idea to require people to use Emacs in order to run Nyxt. It should be noted that Nyxt has support for vi-like keybindings as well as common user access (CUA) keybindings.
According to their FAQ, it was not possible to develop Nyxt as a browser extension, either:
It would not be able to utilize Lisp as a powerful and modern language (a source of many of Nyxt's powerful features). Additionally, many of Nyxt's features are simply not possible due to restrictions in plugin-architecture.
The current stable version of Nyxt is 3.12.0, which was released in October 2024. The 3.x series uses WebKitGTK as its rendering engine, with experimental support for Blink. The project's security policy is terse and to the point: only the latest stable version of Nyxt will receive security updates. There is no announcement list specifically for security issues, and the project requests that vulnerability reports be sent to [email protected] .
... continue reading