I wrote surfsticker so that I can have a browser window on my desktop that is reasonably sticky. What I did not want was the default behavior of surf, where every invocation opens a new window.

Instead, I wrap surf in surfsticker, with an optional -sticker flag.

surfsticker creates a surf window with an extra XProperty on it named _STICKER. Without an explicitly chosen -sticker flag, it will set the value to "default".

Once a surf window has been started by surfsticker with a particular _STICKER, further invocations of surfsticker will re-use the existing window to visit a chosen URL.

Each _STICKER is tied to a stylesheet in ~/.surf/styles.

I have a custom surf stylesheet that I like to use with godoc so that its brightness doesn't melt my eyes. To invoke it, I put the following in my .vimrc:

let g:go_play_browser_command = 'surfsticker -sticker godoc %URL% &'

This opens a surf window labeled with the godoc _STICKER that uses the following stylesheet: ~/.surf/styles/godoc.css. So long as that window stays open, it will be reused every time I surfsticker -sticker godoc https://example.com.

So long as the go toolchain is available and you've added ~/go/bin to your regular path, surfsticker should install and be usable by invoking go install ./... in its root.

surfsticker uses the Linux inotify API.