Support for other browsers

[themoeway-bot]

AdrienLemaire opened issue FooSoft/yomichan#341 on 2020-01-30

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Hi @FooSoft. Thanks for making this tool, I've used it for many years after using Rikaikun, on both chrome/chromium and Firefox.

I'm now adopting vimb as my default browser, but no yomichan is painful.

Vimb explains how to install some plugins like SimplyRead. Get the sources, copy the simplifyread.js content to vimb scripts.js, add a binding to the js function, done.

Yomichan is a much bigger tool, but wouldn't it be possible to copy the proper dir/files and add a mapping to the entrypoint javascript method ?
With 64 js files in your source archive, I haven't dared to try and figure this out by myself. Any hint would be much appreciated :)

[themoeway-bot]

toasted-nutbread commented on 2020-02-02

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There are a few issues that I see with trying to get Yomichan to work on such a browser.

Infrastructure

Yomichan is reliant on the WebExtensions APIs provided by modern web browsers, and the behaviour that the extension environment provides. For example, Yomichan has a hidden background window which does a lot of the processing, and it also relies heavily on IndexedDB to store data. It would also be necessary to have Yomichan's settings page for setup and configuration.

vimb's description indicates that it's a "webkit based web browser", but that doesn't explain the full nature of its capabilities.

Input and controls

What would the method be for activating the input? It looks like it's intended to be primarily keyboard driven, while Yomichan is primarily mouse driven. There has been some work related to using keyboard input to control Yomichan, but it's not a formalized feature currently: #300.

There is also some ongoing work to make Yomichan be able to be used as an app that can be used by other processes: #262. So this would still require a Firefox/Chrom* browser to be installed separately, but a more simple script could be implemented to connect to Yomichan running in that browser (once this feature is fully supported).

[themoeway-bot]

AdrienLemaire commented on 2020-02-03

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Vimb is using webkit2gtk, like Epiphany and Midori. It is apparently the official web engine on GNOME. It seems to have Web Extensions capabilities.

For the method to activate the input, the most natural way (but I only thought about it 20 seconds) would be to press the yomichan keybind after searching for a word on the page (/ on vimb, Ctrl-f on chrome/firefox). yomichan can find the selected search element with the css property ::selection.

I understand that this is not a trivial task, and I'll keep studying japanese / using firefox with yomichan in the meanwhile. Thanks for considering it :)

[Aquafina-water-bottle]

Probably not planned, outside for more popular browsers. Note that #66 is still open.