gander 🦢

Take a gander at the web — a distraction-free terminal browser and MCP server for humans and AI agents.

gander fetches a web page, strips away the navigation/ads/scripts, and gives you just the readable content — as formatted text in your terminal, as an interactive TUI you can scroll and click through, or as tools an AI agent can call over the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Why

Most "AI-friendly" browsing today means shipping a full headless Chromium instance. gander takes the opposite bet: read the web the way a text browser like lynx always has, but with modern content extraction and a first-class MCP server so any MCP-compatible agent can browse readable web content without a GPU or a rendering engine in sight.

Install

git clone https://github.com/abdulkhaliqfarah/gander.git
cd gander
uv venv && source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -e .

Usage

Read a page from the command line

gander view https://example.com/some-article
gander view https://example.com/some-article --json   # structured output

Browse interactively

gander tui                       # opens with an empty address bar
gander tui https://example.com   # opens directly on a page

Keybindings: o open URL · b back · f forward · j/k scroll · g/G top/bottom · q quit. Select any link in the right-hand panel and press Enter to follow it.

Run as an MCP server

gander mcp

This starts a stdio MCP server exposing two tools:

Tool	Description
browse_url(url)	Fetch a URL, return title, markdown content, and links
search_in_page(url, query)	Fetch a URL, return snippets matching a search query

Add it to your MCP client config (e.g. Claude Desktop, VS Code):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gander": {
      "command": "gander",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

How it works

1. Fetch — httpx retrieves the raw HTML.
2. Extract — trafilatura pulls out the main readable content as markdown, and lxml collects every link on the page (resolved to absolute URLs).
3. Present — as rich-formatted terminal output, a textual TUI, or MCP tool responses, depending on how you run it.

Development

uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest
ruff check .

License

MIT © Abdulkhaliq Farah — see LICENSE.