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Cool qutebrowser Customisations

What is qutebrowser? §

Qutebrowser¹ is a keyboard-focused, minimal web browser written in Python. It makes use of Vim-like keybindings, and is surprisingly fast & memory-efficient considering the language in which it is written: it generally starts up faster than the Brave browser on my machine, and consumes less memory than Firefox (which I’ve had memory leak issues with in the past).

It has a minimal graphical user interface, and some primitive built-in adblocking which tends to work quite well, with the exception of YouTube advertisements. It is configured via plaintext Python files, making it highly & easily configurable. It also has the built-in capability to run JavaScript userscripts, making its behaviour even more flexible & customisable.

Configurations in config.py §

I’ll skip over the boring common configurations that have been covered to death by others before me here, such as turning on dark mode or launching the current URL in mpv and skip to configurations that I think have something interesting to them.

Video Speed Controls §

Most video platforms only allow you to speed up a video to $2\times$ speed, which I often find to be not as fast as I would like. I rarely watch a video on lower than $2\times$ speed, unless the timing of the video is important, such as music or comedy, and often want to watch videos on $3\times$ or $4\times$ speed.

The following lines of code, when added to the qutebrowser config.py configuration file, make the up & down arrow keys into video speed controllers which increase the speed of videos on the page by quarter-increments at a time, and allows speeds in excess of the typical limit $2\times$ to be achieved:

1# control video speed
2config.bind("<Up>",     "jseval document.querySelector('video').playbackRate += 0.25;") 
3config.bind("<Down>",   "jseval document.querySelector('video').playbackRate -= 0.25;") 

Clear Notifications (Messages) §

The above speed controls generate messages at the bottom of the screen that show what speed has been set, which I find useful, but if I hit the button several times they can build up and take a while to disappear, so the following keybinding clears them:

1config.bind("cm", "clear-messages") 

Find Missing Webpages §

If a webpage I visit is missing or has been changed, I hit the key combination ,w to find it on the Wayback Machine:

1# search for the current URL in archive.org's wayback machine
2config.bind(",w", "open http://web.archive.org/{url}")

Load the Current Page in Firefox §

If a webpage I visit doesn’t work properly in qutebrowser (as is sometimes, but rarely, the case) I can open the tab in Firefox:

1# keybind to open current url in firefox 
2config.bind("<Ctrl+Alt+t>", "spawn -d firefox {url} ;; tab-close") 

Userscripts §

Redirectors §

I use a number of alternative frontends for various social media sites to avoid having to make an account, and have a number of scripts that redirect each social media page to the alternative frontend.

 1// ==UserScript==
 2// @name        reddit to libreddit redirector
 3// @include     /^https?:\/\/(www\.)?reddit\.com\/.*$/
 4// @run-at      document-start
 5// ==/UserScript==
 6
 7const alt = "libreddit.kavin.rocks" 
 8
 9location.href=location.href.replace(/(www.)?reddit.com/gi, alt);
10console.log("redirected reddit.com to " + alt);

1// ==UserScript==
2// @name        tiktok to proxitok redirector
3// @include     /^https?:\/\/(www\.)?tiktok\.com\/.*$/
4// @run-at      document-start
5// ==/UserScript==
6    
7location.href=location.href.replace(/(www\.)?tiktok.com/gi, "proxitok.pabloferreiro.es");
8console.log("redirected tiktok.com to proxitok.pabloferreiro.es");

1// ==UserScript==
2// @name        twitter to nitter redirector
3// @include     /^https?:\/\/(www\.)?twitter\.com\/.*$/
4// @run-at      document-start
5// ==/UserScript==
6
7location.href=location.href.replace(/(www.)?twitter.com/gi, "nitter.poast.org");
8console.log("redirected twitter.com to nitter.poast.org");

1// ==UserScript==
2// @name        youtube to invidious redirector
3// @include     /^https?:\/\/(www\.)?youtube\.com\/.*$/
4// @run-at      document-start
5// ==/UserScript==
6
7location.href=location.href.replace(/(www\.)?youtube.com/gi, "yewtu.be");
8console.log("redirected youtube.com to yewtu.be");

Smart Video Speed Reset §

As I mentioned above, I typically have my video speeds set to $2\times$ or above except for videos in which the timing is important, such as music or comedy. The following userscript detects the category of a YouTube video and resets the speed to normal speed.

 1// ==UserScript==
 2// @name        normal speed music
 3// @description make music & comedy youtube videos normal speed (for timing purposes)
 4// @include     /^https?:\/\/(www\.)?y\.com\.sb\/watch\?v=.+$/
 5// @include     /^https?:\/\/(www\.)?yewtu\.be\/watch\?v=.+$/
 6// @run-at      document-idle
 7// ==/UserScript==
 8
 9if (document.getElementById("genre").innerHTML.includes("Music") || document.getElementById("genre").innerHTML.includes("Comedy")) {
10    document.querySelector("video").playbackRate = 1;
11}

Note that the above script is written to work on Invidious YouTube frontends rather than YouTube itself, although it could easily be adapted for YouTube by just adding it to the @include section.