A minimalist macOS browser built on WKWebView, intended as a lightweight alternative to Chromium-based main browsers.
Main browsers accumulate massive sessions over time — hundreds of tabs, deep history, heavy memory footprint. View is designed to stay small on purpose: a focused, narrow-session browser that reduces cognitive load on both the user and the machine. It is not meant to replace your main browser; it is meant to be the other browser you switch to when you want to think clearly.
- Single native AppKit binary, no Electron, no Chromium fork
- Vertical tab sidebar only — no horizontal tab strip, no tab overflow
- Minimal address bar with Google fallback and history autocomplete
- Vim-style keybindings on web content, with a per-site whitelist so apps like Gmail / Twitter / YouTube keep their native shortcuts
- Native scroll animation for page navigation:
Ctrl-f/Ctrl-bandgg/Ggo through the same AppKit scroll path as Space / Shift-Space / Cmd-↑ / Cmd-↓, so the feel is identical - Event-driven session persistence — windows, tabs, sidebar width all restore on relaunch with no debounce / no timer
- Multi-window sidebar width sync via in-process notifications
- Favicon display in the sidebar
- Follows system Dark Mode automatically (including blank pages)
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
Cmd-T |
New tab (focus address bar) |
Cmd-N |
New window |
Cmd-L |
Focus address bar |
Cmd-W |
Close window |
Cmd-[ / Cmd-] |
Back / Forward |
Cmd-R |
Reload |
Cmd-1…Cmd-8 |
Switch to tab N |
Cmd-9 |
Last tab |
Cmd-Shift-] / Cmd-Shift-[ |
Next / Previous tab |
Ctrl-Tab / Ctrl-Shift-Tab |
Next / Previous tab |
Ctrl-f / Ctrl-b |
Page down / up (native) |
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
j / k |
Scroll down / up |
d / u |
Half page down / up |
gg / G |
Top / Bottom (native) |
H / L |
History back / forward |
r |
Reload |
The Vim layer passes through on whitelisted sites (mail.google.com, twitter.com, x.com, reddit.com, youtube.com by default) for unmodified keys. Ctrl-f/Ctrl-b and gg/G stay active everywhere because they do not collide with web app shortcuts.
make # debug build (single-arch, ~3s incremental)
make build # release build (universal binary)
make run # debug build and launch
make test # run unit tests
make fmt # swift-format in place
Requires Xcode and macOS 15.0 or newer.
Personal project, MVP. Usable as a daily light-duty browser for the author. Many polish items are still open.
MIT