Browsing in Common Lisp: Nyxt and Emacs

I have kept an eye on Nyxt for a while. Nyxt is a novel browser written in Common Lisp. Think of an Emacs that instead of edit text surfs the Internet. How cool is that?

Recently the smart Atlas engineers have achieved version 2 of this little jewel. I told myself that this was a great time to try. So I downloaded all their blog posts on my ereader, and after a nice weekend morning of discovery I started hacking my way through.

Installing on Ubuntu is easy.

sudo apt install nyxt

With that you can start browsing in Common Lisp!

You can query the commands by doing C-<space>. If you want to get Emacs binding, you want to run emacs-mode. Now instead of C-<space>, you can use M-x for commands. This will work only for the current buffer though, you need some setup to have that globally (I do not know yet how!).

Anyway, use the command set-url to open your first browsing tab. Once you type/select the url and press enter, you are on the Internet via Common Lisp!!! How cool are you?!?

Naturally, that was not enough for me. I want to integrate this browser in my Emacs workflow.

In the blogs I read they said this was possible via slime. So first I run the Nyxt command start-swank, which starts the Common Lisp server. Then I try to connect to it via a Slime REPL from Emacs.

If you do not have Slime installed, look into how to get this wonderful mode: https://github.com/slime/slime.

Naturally, from Ubuntu this will not work. You will most likely get some strange incompatibility error if you try. After banging my head a little, I decided to ask the wise community: https://www.reddit.com/r/Nyxt/comments/njh04d/how_to_connect_200_to_slime/.

The problem is due to dependency hell: Atlas engineers likely use BSD that ship with the latest version of the SBCL, the Common Lisp compiler that they use to build Nyxt.

The kind person that replied to my question suggested to use Guix. This is a pure functional package manager. I used NixOS as my main OS for years, so I understand what Guix tries to do: in short to help people with the headache of dependency management!

These are the steps to make Emacs-Nyxt communication work.

1. install Guix

   cd /tmp
   wget https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/plain/etc/guix-install.sh
   chmod +x guix-install.sh
   sudo ./guix-install.sh
   

2. logout and login again from your OS session
3. remove your old Nyxt

4. install nyxt via Guix

   guix install nyxt
   

5. export the Guix path so you can access Nyxt

   export PATH="~/.guix-profile/bin"
   

Now you can run Nyxt again, and run start-swank. When you connect Slime to localhost:4006, your REPL will show Nyxt!!!

If you now type (list-buffers), you shall see that Nyxt changed: you have just commanded Nyxt from Emacs.

Let me show you, if you do not have time to do this yourself.

Can you see the sea of possibilities? My next step is to integrate engine-mode and Nyxt!

Happy Browsing!