Chawan — TUI Web Browser

2026-07-25 · source · source ↗ · raw capture · wiki page

Chawan is a text-mode web browser and pager for Unix-like systems, written from scratch in Nim. Its UI is inspired by w3m and vi.

It supports JavaScript (QuickJS, opt-in), a substantial subset of CSS (flow, table, flex layout, colors), and inline terminal images via Sixels and the Kitty graphics protocol. It handles HTTP(S), SFTP, FTP, Gopher, Gemini, Finger, and Spartan protocols, with built-in viewers for HTML, plain text, Markdown, man pages, and directory listings. Websites are sandboxed in separate processes with syscall filtering on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux. Keybindings are user-customizable via JavaScript.

Three subprojects support it: Chame (HTML5 parser), Chagashi (character encoding), and Monoucha (QuickJS bindings for Nim). The current stable release is v0.4.3, packaged for most major Linux distributions, BSDs, and Homebrew.

The project is public domain with permissively licensed components.