Browser/Q/Are there any browsers that are designed to be controllable from the terminal?

• Are there any browsers that are designed to be controllable from the terminal?

  • AI Answer

    • Short answer: Yes — not lynx-style text browsers, but real Chromium/Firefox engines that either approximate the page as TTY cells or stream pixels into a terminal that speaks Kitty/Graphics/Protocol. The latter is what you want for YouTube-class rich media inside a TUI.

    • Two families

      • Cell / block approximation — a full browser runs headless; the client paints a text-grid stand-in (often Unicode half-blocks). Usable for layout and JS apps, weaker for video fidelity.
        • Browsh — headless Firefox + extension → interactive TTY (and browser) client. brow.sh · browsh-org/browsh
        • Carbonyl — Chromium fork that renders natively into the terminal (half-block pixels), with WebGL/audio/video claimed; no window server required. fathy.fr/carbonyl · fathyb/carbonyl
      • Pixel stream via Kitty graphics — headless Chromium/Electron frames are drawn as real images in the terminal; mouse/keyboard (and sometimes trackpad) are forwarded back. Needs a compatible emulator (Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, and others that implement the protocol).
        • terminal-browser (zenbu-labs) — Electron offscreen Chromium → Kitty pixels; agent-friendly “same tab” workflow; macOS-first with Linux work in progress. zenbu-labs/terminal-browser
        • casty — Chrome headless-shell + CDP screencast → Kitty graphics; no X11/VNC. Upstream sanohiro/casty; cashmeredev/casty adds --embed so a host TUI owns layout and drives navigate/scroll/click over a Unix-socket IPC (used by kitty-graphics.el for inline browse in terminal Emacs — write-up: cashmere.rs post).
        • glimpse-tty — active fork of awrit; Chromium in Kitty with mouse/keyboard. TalAmuyal/glimpse-tty (awrit: chase/awrit)
        • kitweb — Chrome under Xvfb, FFmpeg x11grab → Kitty frames + audio; Linux-only host, usable over SSH from elsewhere. wensheng/kitweb

    • Fit for a custom TUI that embeds pages / video

      • Closest shape today: casty embed mode — host positions Kitty image frames and sends JSON IPC commands; the browser does not own the whole terminal. That matches “stay in my TUI, pop open a real page with rich media.”
      • Alternative path: drive Browser/Headless Chromium yourself (CDP / automation) and paint frames with Kitty/Graphics/Protocol — same architecture casty uses, more DIY.
      • Standalone pixel browsers (terminal-browser, glimpse-tty, kitweb) are better as the whole pane than as an embeddable widget unless you wrap them.

    • Constraints

      • Rich media needs a real engine (Firefox/Chromium family above), not lynx/w3m.
      • Pixel fidelity depends on Kitty-graphics support in the emulator (and often on the multiplexer; tmux historically drops or needs careful setup for graphics protocols).
      • These projects vary a lot in maturity, OS support, and audio reliability — treat embed/TUI integration as experimental unless you own the host like kitty-graphics.el does.