A plug for Dillo

johnraff · 2010-05-25 05:14:15

Dillo's a terrible web browser - pages come up with link menus filling up the top of the page so you have to scroll and scroll to get to the content, no javascript, no flash, css is messy...

But that's not what it's about. All those missing frills mean a dillo window comes up in a flash - really fast, faster than a urxvt terminal for me! That makes it great for trawling around a folder of html help files, text files, .gz files (decompressed automatically), image files... if you just want to have a look at some stuff on your system, this is faster than anything. It's also fantastic for a quick web search if you haven't got Firefox up and running and just need to get to a bit of text. Tabs, images, adblocking... I think it might beat elinks etc.

Here's the Dillo site: http://www.dillo.org/
There are some deb files here: https://launchpad.net/~d.filoni/+archive/dillo (usual disclaimer about untrusted PPA's)

edit 121005 Dillo 3 is now available in the Wheezy repositories. smile
Unfortunately the dillo 2 deb files I linked to above are no longer available, and dillo 3 is not in the Squeeze repos. If you're using Statler and need a dillo deb file, I've put my own copy (ssl enabled) here but remember this is a personal copy of someone else's PPA file so there are no guarantees whatsoever about its contents. This ssl version enables you to read https sites like the Ubuntu wiki, but don't use it for internet banking!!

Once it's installed, I'd recommend disabling css - it slows things down and messes things up for no big improvement in appearance. Use the tools button at the top, or edit your ~/.dillo/dillorc file (you probably want to edit that file anyway).

Try entering file:/usr/share/doc/ in the address bar (NB it's not file:///usr...) and see how quickly that huge list loads up. Navigate anywhere else in your computer's file system and read just about anything except binary files.
Have a look at file:/usr/share/doc/dillo/user_help.html

Great stuff! big_smile (btw I have no connection with the Dillo project.)

Last edited by johnraff (2012-10-05 05:30:24)

FiniteStateMachine · 2010-05-25 12:17:57

I like dillo. I've used it before. Even just to find the sites that assume you'll be using css and provide no alternative lol
It is mighty quick though. I might give it a try for file browsing as you suggest.

benj1 · 2010-05-25 13:33:18

johnraff wrote:

, faster than a urxvt terminal for me!

you should try urxvtc and urxvtd, ill be very impressed if it starts faster than that.

also have a look at w3m-img, its in the repos, it displays images in the terminal, the rendering for me seems to be better than dillo, as well as being as light weight.

johnraff · 2010-05-25 17:10:05

FiniteStateMachine wrote:

I like dillo. I've used it before. Even just to find the sites that assume you'll be using css and provide no alternative

Of course a properly written site ought to be perfectly usable without css, if less pretty. roll

benj1 wrote:

have a look at w3m-img

Will do, thanks smile
(I keep meaning to set up that urxvt daemon thing.)

edit:
I've just tried running 'urxvtd -o -f' followed by urxvtc and, to be honest, didn't really notice any difference in the time taken to open a urxvt window compared with a direct call to urxvt - a bit under a second in both cases. Sure, it's plenty fast enough for me either way, and hard to measure at all accurately. I think the main advantage of running the urxvtd daemon is supposed to be that when you open lots of terminal windows the memory use doesn't pile up.

Anyway - note that the time to open a dillo window, loading my bookmarks page, on this same box is about the same, just under a second! cool

Last edited by johnraff (2010-05-26 02:22:30)

benj1 · 2010-05-26 12:44:26

for 'time urxvt -e cal'
i get
real 0m1.421s
user 0m0.812s
sys 0m0.072s

for 'time urxvtc -e cal'
i get
real 0m0.144s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.004s

with repeats showing consistent results, that is from an existing urxvtc instance though (with urxvtd started in my autostart.sh). It seems to be in the order of 1.5s(urxvt) and 0.4s(urxvtc) starting from terminator so slower but still quicker for urxvtc, i would be very surprised if dillo were quicker (time dillo& killall dillo take the same time as urxvtc for me but that doesn't even attempt to load the window, so that may just be a reflection of the speed of killall rather than dillo)

ps the urxvtcd command will check if the daemons running, and if not launch it, as well as launching urxvtc.

johnraff · 2010-05-26 16:36:44

OK my figures (launched from a urxvt window):
time urxvtc -e cal
real 0m0.504s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

time urxvt -e cal
real 0m0.930s
user 0m0.060s
sys 0m0.020s

so the daemon is faster, but the difference isn't as great as what you get, for some reason. The subjective time for the window to appear is really almost the same, and at the end of the day that's what matters perhaps? Dillo, likewise, seems to come up in about the same time, less than a second anyway. (with about 300MB of free RAM, 2.8GHz cpu)

Ah, try this:
urxvt & dillo
for me the dillo window opens first, with the urxvt on top of it cool
On the other hand,
urxvtc & dillo
urxvtc opens first, then dillo covers it.

benj1 · 2010-05-27 12:30:08

i get the same, im not sure what thats indicative of tho, disk io?.
i notice the difference between urxvtc and urxvt, the former comes up instantly while theres a slight lag with the latter, but i tend to have a window open anyway so its not really an issue.

not sure why your urxvtc is so much slower than mine, especially as i have a 500mhz proc and 192mb ram, although i did compile urxvt myself.

johnraff · 2010-05-27 16:38:08

benj1 wrote:

i get the same, im not sure what thats indicative of tho, disk io?.

Whatever it is, the end result is Dillo is fast! Right?

not sure why your urxvtc is so much slower than mine, especially as i have a 500mhz proc and 192mb ram, although i did compile urxvt myself.

Mine is from the Jaunty repos. (Why did you compile yours?) Yes it is interesting that your urxvtc is so much faster to start up. Maybe I've got a slow hard disk?

benj1 · 2010-05-28 10:53:25

font spacing, newer versions allow you to increase / decrease font spacing, thinking about it i didn't compile i grabbed the sid package and installed that on 9.04.
Doubt its hd speed mines 40 gig, so pretty old, although the small size may actually make it quicker to search. (dreams up scheme to sell worlds fastest (1 bit) hard drive).

johnraff · 2010-05-28 17:26:08

Hmm mine's only 80G.

my urxvt version:

edit: added version number!
Version: 9.06-1
Package: rxvt-unicode
Installed-Size: 2932
Maintainer: Ubuntu MOTU Developers <ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com>
This package contains the program version with most commonly-used features
enabled, including transparency, (16-bit) Unicode and FreeType font support.

Last edited by johnraff (2010-06-02 03:29:43)

benj1 · 2010-06-01 17:51:08

sorry for the delay, been away for the bank holiday.

mine is urxvt v9.07, (from urxvt -V) although i notice you didn't actually post your version wink

it lets you use URxvt.letterspace: in .Xresources, -1 makes monospace look nicer

johnraff · 2010-06-02 04:29:52

benj1 wrote:

mine is urxvt v9.07, (from urxvt -V) although i notice you didn't actually post your version

...er, sorry, I left that out of the text I grabbed... neutral Now added.

btw I tried that urxvt vs urxvtc test on a much slower (266MHz, 192MB) box running Statler and got much the same results. The daemon version was slightly faster: real time 1.1s vs 1.5s. But the BIG difference was memory use. Checking with htop, every new instance of urxvt took some 6% of my precious ram, while using urxvtc didn't start a new process at all, and the urxvtd daemon took just a tiny bit more than it was using already. If you plan to have a number of terminals open at once, obviously the daemon is the way to go.
The only snag is if urxvd dies it will take all those terminals, and their processes, with it.

( btw Dillo is pretty cool cool )

Sector11 · 2010-09-24 18:41:56

OK, I give up what the heck is: urxvt-c-d-e-or_whatever?

Dillo I've seen.

anonymous · 2010-09-24 19:27:31

rxvt is a terminal. sudo apt-get install rxvt-unicode

Sector11 · 2010-09-24 19:39:11

anonymous wrote:

rxvt is a terminal. sudo apt-get install rxvt-unicode

Tha's why I cpuldn't find it, they are talking urxvt big_smile

I'll stay with terminator.

johnraff · 2010-09-25 04:13:33

Agreed, the name is confusing. The package is called rxvt-unicode but the command you call it with is urxvt.
It's a nice quick terminal that displays strange characters like Japanese OK and does all kinds of things that uber-geeks know how to do using ~/.Xdefaults. I ignore all that except for setting the font and background colours, but it is a lot faster than terminator. Open a long man page and scroll to and fro to see the difference, unless you have a turbocharged CPU. You don't get tabs or split windows but I rarely use that stuff anyway.

urxvt also comes with a daemon called urxvtd which you can start up from your autostart.sh with a line 'urxvtd -q -o -f &'. Then if you open the client called urxvtc, instead of urxvt, it comes up a bit faster and uses a lot less memory, especially if you open several of them. This makes quite a difference for RAM-starved older machines.

btw anonymous, rxvt is a different package in it's own right that rxvt-unicode was developed from. Going further back in time there's also xvt! xvt is very light and fast if you're using a very old box and don't mind its (many) missing features.

anonymous · 2010-09-25 04:19:37

So which one do you use, plain rxvt or rxvt-unicode? Also do you know if urxvt lets you scroll with the mouse wheel?

johnraff · 2010-09-25 04:42:18

I use rxvt-unicode - it seems to be much more popular than rxvt, but my original reason was that I needed the unicode support to display Japanese. (The newer but heavier terminals all do that of course.)

urxvt does let you scroll with the wheel. smile You can adjust the scrollbar appearance. Just to get you started, here are my settings in .Xdefaults (some people use .Xresources) but a google on '.Xdefaults urxvt' should bring up lots of stuff.

URxvt.font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*
!URxvt*font: xft:DejaVuSansMono:pixelsize=13
URxvt*scrollstyle: plain
URxvt*scrollBar: true
URxvt*scrollBar_right: true
URxvt*iconFile: /usr/share/pixmaps/gnome-color-xterm.png
URxvt*background: #000020
URxvt*foreground: #ffffff
!URxvt*cursorColor: magenta

(Commented-out lines start with a ! )

Sector11 · 2010-09-25 15:14:06

johnraff wrote:

Agreed, the name is confusing. The package is called rxvt-unicode but the command you call it with is urxvt.

Thank you for this. I've installed #! v10 Xfce on my mom-in-laws new (secondhand) first computer. A Compaq PIII with very little RAM She knows NOTHING about computers. On Monday her Internet connection is coming.

I'm going to need to TRIM stuff. I frequently have 3 windows open in terminator. big_smile

johnraff · 2010-09-25 16:17:54

Sector11, you've just hit a kiloposts - congratulations!
Re trimming RAM, there are lots of things you can do, but although Dillo could be a candidate to help here, maybe this would be a good topic for a new thread?

wuy · 2010-09-27 08:51:18

Actually urxvt can have tabs (I think it's the "tabbed" option).

johnraff · 2012-10-05 05:13:53

Bad news: dillo moved from ver 2 to ver 3 and the deb files I linked to in the first post are no longer available. sad

Good news: dillo 3 (with many improvements) is now in the Debian Wheezy repositories! cool

CrunchBang Linux

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#1 2010-05-25 05:14:15

A plug for Dillo

#2 2010-05-25 12:17:57

Re: A plug for Dillo

#3 2010-05-25 13:33:18

Re: A plug for Dillo

#4 2010-05-25 17:10:05

Re: A plug for Dillo

#5 2010-05-26 12:44:26

Re: A plug for Dillo

#6 2010-05-26 16:36:44

Re: A plug for Dillo

#7 2010-05-27 12:30:08

Re: A plug for Dillo

#8 2010-05-27 16:38:08

Re: A plug for Dillo

#9 2010-05-28 10:53:25

Re: A plug for Dillo

#10 2010-05-28 17:26:08

Re: A plug for Dillo

#11 2010-06-01 17:51:08

Re: A plug for Dillo

#12 2010-06-02 04:29:52

Re: A plug for Dillo

#13 2010-09-24 18:41:56

Re: A plug for Dillo

#14 2010-09-24 19:27:31

Re: A plug for Dillo

#15 2010-09-24 19:39:11

Re: A plug for Dillo

#16 2010-09-25 04:13:33

Re: A plug for Dillo

#17 2010-09-25 04:19:37

Re: A plug for Dillo

#18 2010-09-25 04:42:18

Re: A plug for Dillo

#19 2010-09-25 15:14:06

Re: A plug for Dillo

#20 2010-09-25 16:17:54

Re: A plug for Dillo

#21 2010-09-27 08:51:18

Re: A plug for Dillo

#22 2012-10-05 05:13:53

Re: A plug for Dillo

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