This keyboard-first browser feels like a superpower once you learn the shortcuts

If, like me, you also dream of one day controlling your entire PC with just your keyboard, or if you are a Vim enthusiast, you absolutely must try this nice browser called Qutebrowser.

What is Qutebrowser and why should you use it

It’s much quicker to use and easier on your wrists

Qutebrowser is a free and open source project that uses a special version of the Chromium engine (called QtWebEngine). The browser respects your privacy and does not embed any trackers or telemetry. It does everything a normal browser can do, except you can do it entirely with a keyboard.

But why bother learning how to browse the web with a keyboard? I can give you two reasons.

1. It’s faster. Normally, browsing the web means switching between keyboard and mouse one after the other. If your hands never leave the keyboard, you save the time you would have spent switching hundreds of times. Plus, keyboard shortcuts are arguably faster than moving the cursor and clicking on things.

2. Browsing the Internet with a standard keyboard and mouse means you make repetitive, precise hand movements to reach for the mouse and aim, click, or scroll with it. Naturally, after a while, your dominant hand gets tired. If you eliminate the mouse or trackpad factor, your hands will simply rest on the keyboard’s home row at all times. You can see why it’s more ergonomic.

Over the last few years, I’ve started to notice that my right wrist (I’m right-handed) gets tired quickly. So I spent some time creating a desktop with a keyboard (using the i3 tiling window manager) and Qutebrowser. This has allowed me to minimize the use of my mouse, which in turn helps with my wrist issues.

Once you learn how to use Qutebrowser, it feels like a superpower. Every time I go back to a classic browser after using Qutebrowser, it seems slow and clunky.

Configuring Qutebrowser

You can install it with just one command

Qutebrowser is available on Linux, macOS and Windows. For macOS and Windows, you can download the installers from the Qutebrowser website. On Linux, you can use your distribution’s default package manager to install it. both apt and pacman have it in the official repositories.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install qutebrowser

Use the desktop shortcut or enter qutebrowser in a terminal to launch it. Note how surprisingly minimalist the interface is compared to a regular browser. There’s just a status bar at the bottom and tab indicators at the top.

To access the different menus and settings, simply type : without selecting anything. Then you can use Tab to cycle through different command suggestions.

It’s also much more customizable than any mainstream browser. You can modify the Qutebrowser browser configuration to make it look and behave precisely as you want.

Navigate the browser with your keyboard

Learn Vim modes

Qutebrowser uses what are called Vim modes and keyboard shortcuts. Normally, when you edit a text file, you use the mouse to navigate and select the text, and you use the keyboard to type. What if you could do both things with the keyboard? This would completely remove the need for a mouse. This is what Vim is built on.

By default, when you open the Vim text editor, it opens in “Normal” mode. Normal mode is navigation mode. You can use the j And k keys to scroll down and scroll up. You can press h to scroll left and l to scroll right.

You can press the g key twice and this gg The shortcut will instantly move you to the top of the text file. You can maintain Shift and press gAnd G will instantly take you to the very bottom of the text file. There are a whole bunch of these keyboard shortcuts that make navigation quick and painless.

Then there is Insert mode. THE i The key is reserved for this mode. Wherever you press the i key, it will instantly go into “entry” mode. When you have finished typing, you can return to “browse” mode by pressing Esc.

Qutebrowser uses these same Vim principles. There are many key combinations, but you don’t need to learn them all.

Some Qutebrowser keyboard shortcuts to get you started

Learn these few basic keyboard shortcuts and they will get you 80% of the way there. You can always view the full list of keyboard shortcuts by typing :help.

Open a website or search with the default search engine

Press o and start typing. You can enter a URL or search query here, just like you would in a regular browser. Press Enter to load it.

Click and interact with the web page

Once the web page has loaded, you can now interact with it by highlighting links. Press f and Qutebrowser will display small tags on any clickable or interactive elements on that page. For example, I searched for “gentoo wiki” in the status bar when I pressed o earlier. Pressing f reveals all these highlighted links. If I want to open the first search result, I press j SO a. I can open the Wikipedia link by typing kd.

Scroll and jump to a web page

However, if I want to scroll down this Google search page. I can support Esc to clear highlighted links. Then I press j to scroll down and k to scroll up. Typing gg takes me to the top of the page. And hit Shift+g moves the cursor down.

Switch between tabs and close tabs

Let’s say I’ve already opened a link and want to return to the results page. I can support Shift+h And Shift+l to come and go.

Hold down Shift and press o to load a web search or website in a new tab.

Now that you have multiple tabs open, you can switch between them using Shift+k And Shift+j. You can navigate to specific tabs by tapping Alt+

To close a tab, tap d. If you accidentally close one, tap u undo. Press u several times to continue opening recently closed tabs in order. To reload a tab, tap r.

Typing on web pages

When you want to enter text in a form or input field, you must switch to Insert mode. If the cursor is already on the input field, simply press the key i key and start typing. If you need to move the cursor to the input box, tap f and follow the key combination to click on the field. Most of the time, this will automatically put you into Insert mode. Keep an eye on the bottom of the status bar.

Some warnings to be aware of

You may need to use the mouse occasionally, and it doesn’t support extensions

As effective as this Vim-based environment is, it is not perfect. Sometimes the link highlighting feature will miss an interactive element that you want to interact with. Sometimes websites hijack the focus and capture your cursor in their input fields, even if you are in Normal mode. You will be forced to use your mouse in both of these scenarios. However, I find them rare.

Additionally, some sites may ask you to upgrade your browser when using Qutebrowser. In my experience, these are just harmless warnings because the websites load and work just fine most of the time.

The biggest drawback is its lack of extension support. All you can do is run user scripts to access things like your password managers.

It takes a little patience to learn this, but it’s worth it

There is a bit of a learning curve with Qutebrowser, especially if you’ve never used Vim bindings before. But I can personally testify that learning them is worth it. At first it was somewhat frustrating to stick to the keyboard, but a few days later it started to become muscle memory. It’s a bit like learning to ride a bike, I think. This also means that you can return to this workflow after ages and muscle memory will come into play almost instantly.