Motho ke motho ka botho

I really love Kazehakase: It’s light, it’s fast, it’s clean and it does things that Firefox hasn’t thought of yet, or maybe needs a plugin to do (like a Tab Tree rather than just a list of active tabs, or a thumbnailed history of closed pages).

It does have some shortcomings, though. For one thing, the version I’m using (0.3.8 in Edgy) is a bit sloppy when it comes to cleaning up after itself. I don’t like leftover caches, or an item history in the drop-down URL bar. And I resent leftover cookies. I want each browser session to start clean and fresh.

I couldn’t find options to clear those items on exit, although it’s possible that the Feisty version (0.4.2, I believe) will have those in place. In the meantime, I’ve resorted to a bash script. Here’s what it looks like.

#!/bin/sh
kazehakase
rm ~/.kazehakase/mozilla/kazehakase/cookies.txt
rm ~/.kazehakase/mozilla/kazehakase/Cache/*
cp ~/.kazehakase/kzrc.orig ~/.kazehakase/kzrc

In other words, start Kazehakase as usual, then when finished, delete the cookies file, anything cached and then restore a fresh kzrc. I keep a kzrc.orig with no leftover history (under [LocationEntry] inside kzrc), and just overwrite the one Kazehakase makes when it closes.

You could even preset kzrc.orig to hold some of the URLs you actually want in the address bar history. When you start Kazehakase, those URLs would be in the history already, but nothing from your last session would be. Mmm, that fresh, clean feeling.

For me it’s a particularly easy thing to trigger that bash script, since I just point the Openbox menu at the script and everything behaves as usual. I’m sure it’s as simple under other desktop environments or with different window managers.