A compact, text-oriented web browser for the WHY2025 badge.
Mini Browser is a lightweight, SDL-based browser that retrieves and renders plain text web pages.
It is designed for constrained environments where speed, memory efficiency, and simplicity are essential.
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Link navigation
All<a href>targets are extracted and indexed numerically as[n].
Use Tab / Shift+Tab to select a link, and Enter to open it. -
Direct URL input
Type into the address bar, press Enter to navigate.
Bare hostnames are automatically expanded (e.g.example.org → https://example.org). -
Redirect handling
Supports standard HTTP 3xx redirects. -
Relative URL resolution
Handles relative paths (/foo,../bar,//host/...) against the active base URL. -
Entity decoding
Decodes common HTML entities (&,<,>,",'). -
Keyboard-only interface
Fully controlled using the badge keyboard. -
URL bar with icon
- Cyan square at the top-left with a yellow magnifying glass icon.
- Long URLs are left-clipped with an ellipsis (
...example.com/page).
- Keyboard controls
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Typing: edits the URL in the bar (ASCII only).
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Enter: navigate to typed URL, or follow the currently selected
[n]link. -
Backspace: delete last character in the URL bar.
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Scrolling:
↓: scroll down↑: scroll up
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Link selection:
Shift+Tab: show links in pages with numbersTab: show next linkShift+Tab: previous linkEnter: go to selected link
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WHY key (accelerator) combos (hold the WHY/
0xE3key and press…):E— Edit: prefill URL withhttps://H— Home: go to home pageR— Reload current pageB— Back in historyQ— Quit
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These dedicated keys provide instant navigation:
- 🟥 Square → NPR Text
- 🔺 Triangle → Hacker News
- ❌ Cross → Hacker News
- 🟢 Circle → What is my IP address?
- ☁️ Cloud → Bobcat Browser
- 🔷 Diamond → Curl
- Fetch: pages retrieved with libcurl (up to 64 KB by default).
- Parse: minimal HTML walker:
- skips
<head>,<script>,<style> - collapses whitespace and decodes entities
- extracts and indexes links
- skips
- Wrap: text wrapped to fit viewport width using a fixed 5×7 bitmap font.
- Render: SDL draws the address bar, separators, and text viewport.
- No CSS/JS/Images — purely text output.
- ASCII focus — non-ASCII simplified to
?. - No cookies or sessions — no persistence across requests.
- Content cap — maximum page size 64 KB.
- Rookie project - it is what it is
- Wikipedia (mobile)
- Hacker News
- OpenBSD
- SQLite Documentation
- Linux Man Pages
- RFC Editor
- Plan 9 / cat-v
- Kernel.org
- Lua
- musl libc
- Built on BadgeVMS, SDL, and libcurl.
- Font: custom 5×7 ASCII bitmap.
- Developed for the WHY2025 badge community.
- Lots of copy and paste example code .... but it seems to work.