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<table align="center"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p></p> <pre> O O \ / O —— Cr —— O / \ O O</pre> </td> <td><h1>Carbonyl</h1></td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

Carbonyl is a Chromium based browser built to run in a terminal. Read the blog post.

It supports pretty much all Web APIs including WebGL, WebGPU, audio and video playback, animations, etc..

It's snappy, starts in less than a second, runs at 60 FPS, and idles at 0% CPU usage. It does not require a window server (i.e. works in a safe-mode console), and even runs through SSH.

Carbonyl originally started as html2svg and is now the runtime behind it.

Usage

Carbonyl on Linux without Docker requires the same dependencies as Chromium.

Docker

$ docker run --rm -ti fathyb/carbonyl https://youtube.com

npm

$ npm install --global carbonyl
$ carbonyl https://github.com

Binaries

Demo

<table> <tbody> <tr> <td> <video src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5746414/213682926-f1cc2de7-a38c-4125-9257-92faecfc7e24.mp4"> </td> <td> <video src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5746414/213682913-398d3d11-1af8-4ae6-a0cd-a7f878efd88b.mp4"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"> <video src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5746414/213682918-d6396a4f-ee23-431d-828e-4ad6a00e690e.mp4"> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

Known issues

Comparisons

Lynx

Lynx is the original terminal web browser, and the oldest one still maintained.

Pros

Cons

Some might sound like pluses, but Browsh and Carbonyl let you disable most of those if you'd like

Browsh

Browsh is the original "normal browser into a terminal" project. It starts Firefox in headless mode and connects to it through an automation protocol.

Pro

Cons

Operating System Support

As far as tested, the operating systems under are supported:

Contributing

Carbonyl is split in two parts: the "core" which is built into a shared library (libcarbonyl), and the "runtime" which dynamically loads the core (carbonyl executable).

The core is written in Rust and takes a few seconds to build from scratch. The runtime is a modified version of the Chromium headless shell and takes more than an hour to build from scratch.

If you're just making changes to the Rust code, build libcarbonyl and replace it in a release version of Carbonyl.

Core

$ cargo build

Runtime

Few notes:

Fetch

Fetch Chromium's code.

$ ./scripts/gclient.sh sync

Apply patches

Any changes made to Chromium will be reverted, make sure to save any changes you made.

$ ./scripts/patches.sh apply

Configure

$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/Default

Default is the target name, you can use multiple ones and pick any name you'd like, i.e.:

$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/release
$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/debug
# or if you'd like to build a multi-platform image
$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/arm64
$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/amd64

When prompted, enter the following arguments:

import("//carbonyl/src/browser/args.gn")

# uncomment this to build for arm64
# target_cpu = "arm64"

# comment this to disable ccache
cc_wrapper = "env CCACHE_SLOPPINESS=time_macros ccache"

# comment this for a debug build
is_debug = false
symbol_level = 0
is_official_build = true

Build binaries

$ ./scripts/build.sh Default

This should produce the following outputs:

Build Docker image

# Build arm64 Docker image using binaries from the Default target
$ ./scripts/docker-build.sh Default arm64
# Build amd64 Docker image using binaries from the Default target
$ ./scripts/docker-build.sh Default amd64

Run

$ ./scripts/run.sh Default https://wikipedia.org