gowser

gowser

A terminal-based web browser written in Go. Renders web pages as readable markdown with optional interactive navigation, JavaScript rendering, and vim-style keybindings.

Features

• Renders HTML as clean, readable markdown
• Interactive TUI mode with navigable links
• JavaScript rendering via headless Chrome (for JS-heavy sites)
• Lite mode for text-friendly site alternatives
• Vim-style navigation
• In-page search with highlighting
• Save pages as markdown files
• DuckDuckGo search integration
• Readability mode (extracts main content) with raw mode toggle

Requirements

• Go 1.21+
• gox - Go extension for JSX-like syntax
• Chrome/Chromium (optional, for -j JavaScript mode)

Installation

# Install gox transpiler
go install github.com/germtb/gox@latest

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/germtb/gowser.git
cd gowser

# Build
gox build .

Usage

gowser [options] <url or search query>

Options

Flags can be combined: -il, -sil, -ij, -sij

Examples

# Simple fetch and display as markdown
gowser example.com

# Interactive browsing with TUI
gowser -i example.com

# Use lite/text-friendly versions
gowser -l reddit.com          # Uses old.reddit.com

# Render JavaScript-heavy sites
gowser -j instagram.com

# Interactive + JS rendering
gowser -ij react-app.com

# DuckDuckGo search
gowser -s cli web browser

# Search in interactive mode
gowser -si golang tutorial

Lite Mode Mappings

Keybindings (Interactive Mode)

Architecture

gowser/
├── main.gox     # Main TUI application (gox/JSX syntax)
├── fetch.go     # HTTP fetching + headless browser (rod)
├── convert.go   # HTML to markdown conversion
└── parser.go    # Markdown parsing for TUI rendering

Dependencies

• goli - TUI framework
• gox - JSX-like syntax for Go
• go-readability - Content extraction
• html-to-markdown - HTML conversion
• rod - Headless browser automation

License

MIT License - see LICENSE for details.