// the find
kovidgoyal/vise
A keyboard driven browser with tabs in a tree
Vise is a Vim-modal browser built on QtWebEngine (embedded Chromium) by the author of Calibre and kitty. It replaces the browser-plus-extension stack with a single integrated tool: tree-style tabs, keyboard-driven navigation, and filesystem-based password storage. It's for Linux developers who've hit the ceiling of what Vimium or Tridactyl can do.
The author is Kovid Goyal, who ships and maintains serious C/Python projects long-term — not a weekend experiment. Tree-style tabs are first-class, not bolted on via an extension that breaks every Firefox update. Password storage is deliberately simple: encrypted files you can sync with rsync or git, no cloud dependency. Client-side JS is written in RapydScript (.pyj files), which means the browser UI logic stays in Python-land rather than requiring you to context-switch into raw JS.
207 stars and 8 forks after years of development is a very thin community — bug reports, keybinding docs, and plugin ecosystem are essentially just the author. Linux-only in practice; the README says the code is cross-platform but the author explicitly doesn't test elsewhere, so Windows/macOS are non-starters. The build step requires rapydscript to compile client JS, which is an obscure dependency that adds friction to anyone trying to contribute or package it. No ad-blocking by design; the README punts this to system-level hosts files, which is the right call philosophically but means new users have extra setup before the browser is usable day-to-day.