Bug#697652: RFP: vimprobable2 -- Light-weight Webkit based browser with Vimperator's fingerfeel
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
* Package name : vimprobable2
Version : 1.2.0
Upstream Author : Hannes Schueller et al.
* URL or Web page : http://www.vimprobable.org/
* License : MIT
Description : Light-weight Webkit based browser with Vimperator's fingerfeel
Vimprobable is a web browser that behaves like the Vimperator plugin
available for Mozilla Firefox. It is based on the WebKit engine (using
GTK bindings). The goal of Vimprobable is to build a completely
keyboard-driven, efficient and pleasurable browsing-experience. Its
featureset might be considered "minimalistic", but not as minimalistic
as being completely featureless.
Despite there are already some vi-like Webkit GTK based browsers in
Debian (Luakit, Surf, Uzbl, Dwb and Xxxterm), this was the first one
with vi-like keybindings which was intuitively usable for me. A
comparison of most of these browsers is available at [0].
[0] http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/vimprobable/wiki/Alternatives
Vimprobable was started in March 2009 (i.e. before the first commits of
Surf, Uzbl and Luakit) as Vimpression, but has been discontinued a few
months later. Nevertheless it already had a community big enough
to take over. It has been renamed to Vimprobable in October 2009 (upon
wish of the original author) and that team seems to maintain it since
then.
Vimprobable is already offically packaged for at least ArchLinux,
FreeBSD and NetBSD.
Vimprobable1 and Vimprobable2 both recently saw their 1.0 release after
close to 4 years of developement, hence they can be considered stable
and mature.
As the lighter Vimprobable1 is just configurable via config.h, it seems
less suitable for Debian. The slightly bloatier but more featureful and
easier configurable Vimprobable2 seems to fit better.
There are already Ubuntu packages of Vimprobable2 at [1] and the package
of 1.2.0 builds and works fine on Wheezy, too.
[1] https://launchpad.net/~serge-hallyn/+archive/vimprobable
The packages are not perfect, but all the show-stoppers I found so far
(like being a native package) seem easy to fix. I'd also help to get the
package in shape for Debian as I did some preliminary vimprobable1
packaging work[2] in the past.
[2] https://github.com/xtaran/vimprobable
As vimprobable isn't my primary browser, I don't want to maintain it
alone (hence RFP and not ITP), but I'm open for co-maintaining it.
Regards, Axel
--
,''`. | Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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