NAME

cha - the Chawan text-mode browser

SYNOPSIS

cha [options] [URL(s) or file(s)...]

DESCRIPTION

Chawan is a text-mode browser. It can be used as a pager, or as a web/(S)FTP/gopher/gemini/file browser. It understands HTML and CSS, and when enabled by the user, can also execute JavaScript and display images (on terminals supporting Sixel or the Kitty image protocol.)

Chawan can also be used as a general text-based document viewer as described in cha-mailcap(5), or as a hyperlinked man page viewer using mancha(1).

This document describes the invocation of Chawan. For a list of default keybindings, type cha about:chawan. For a detailed description of the configuration format, see cha-config(5).

ARGUMENTS

On invocation, Chawan attempts to open all URL/file arguments supplied. If no URLs could successfully be opened, Chawan exits automatically.

Chawan may also be started without specifying a file, if a file is provided through a pipe. In this case, you can specify the content type using the -T switch.

OPTIONS

All command line options have short forms (e.g. -d) and long forms (e.g. --dump).

Long forms must be introduced with two dashes; when only a single dash is provided, each letter is parsed as a separate short form.

In short form, it is also valid to provide values to arguments without a subsequent space. For example, -obuffer.images=true is valid.

-c, --css stylesheet: Temporarily modify the user stylesheet. If a user stylesheet is already being used, the stylesheet given is appended to that.
-d, --dump: Start in headless mode, and sequentially print the opened files to stdout. This option is implicitly enabled if stdout is not a tty (e.g. when piping cha output).
-h, --help: Print a short version of this page, then exit.
-o, --opt config: Pass temporary configuration options. This accepts the configuration format described in cha-config(5), so the passed string must be valid TOML.

To ease specifying string parameters, unrecognized bare keywords are converted to strings. So this works:

--opt display.color-mode=eight-bit.

However, symbols and words starting with a number must still be quoted, i.e. you have to quote them twice to bypass shell quoting.

-r, --run script/file: Execute the string provided as a JS script, or execute the supplied JS file. If the file ends in .mjs, it is executed as an ES module.
-v, --version: Print information about the browser’s version, then exit.
-C, --config file: Override the default configuration search path. Both absolute and relative paths are allowed.
-I, --input-charset charset: Override the character set of all input files. Useful when Chawan is incorrectly recognizing the input character set.

(If this happens often, consider changing the default input charset recognition list encoding.document-charset in the configuration.)

-M, --monochrome: Force monochrome output. Formatting (bold/italic/etc.) is not affected. This is a shortcut for -o display.color-mode=monochrome.
-O, --output-charset charset: Override the output character set. This is a shortcut for -o encoding.display-charset=charset.
-T, --type content-type: Override the content type of all input files. Useful when the content type cannot be guessed from the file extension, or when reading a non-plaintext file from stdin.
-V, --visual: When no files/URLs are passed, open the page specified in start.visual-home instead of printing a help screen.
--: Interpret all following arguments as files. For example, you can open a file named -o, using cha -- -o.

ENVIRONMENT

Certain environment variables are read and used by Chawan.