EWW: Emacs Web Wowser

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eww.html

by tosh • 6 years ago

160 51 6 years ago

VWWHFSfQ• 6 years ago

Good to see some competition in the browser wars. Badly needed.

seabass• 6 years ago

A highly specialized browser for emacs from 2013 is hardly competition against consumer browsers. I don’t think they’re directly comparable either.

fmakunbound• 6 years ago

I’m sure grandpa was being facetious

iamnotarobotman• 6 years ago

I guess eww is for those who are infatuated by their editors, rather than getting things done with it, when the rest of the world just uses Chrome.

II2II• 6 years ago

On the other hand, it is nice when the competition brings something completely different to the table. It serves the needs of people who would never have those needs served by consumer oriented browsers.

While this may not be competition in the "winner takes all" sense, eww is does have to consider what those consumer browsers are offering in the context of its domain of application. If it doesn't, it will lose those users and it's reason for being.

userbinator• 6 years ago

This one competes with the other text-based ones out there, and I'd almost call it a "HTML viewer" instead of "web browser" due to the limited features it has --- it's basically HTML-only with no CSS support, so far more limited than even Dillo or NetSurf; but works well for viewing documentation and other primarily text-based and "content-focused" sites.

na852• 6 years ago

I'd almost call it a "HTML viewer" instead of "web browser"

Ahh but it's not a browser. It's a wowser.

NelsonMinar2• 6 years ago

Yes. I predict as many as 0.01% of web users will be using EWW in the year 2025

wjohnsto• 6 years ago

I think that's a pretty lofty goal/estimate.

pmoriarty• 6 years ago

I've been using emacs-w3m for a long time, but I haven't used eww. If someone who's used both could compare the two, I'd be grateful.

defanor2• 6 years ago

- Not sure if it's still the case in most recent versions, but apparently w3m used to be snappier (I suspect there is some blocking still happening in eww, or maybe it's just that it loads emacs/elisp more).

- w3m just ignores colours, while eww applies the ones it recognizes, though in newer versions it can be disabled (it seemed like a major misfeature to me, but YMMV, and it's not that relevant anymore).

- Being written in elisp, eww is more hackable and generally fits a bit better into emacs.

Both render reasonable HTML subsets fine, can load images and handle forms.

TeMPOraL• 6 years ago

it seemed like a major misfeature to me

Webpage-provided colors may not play well with the color scheme you're using (AFAIR, eww doesn't "reset" to black-on-white, but keeps your current color theme for things not explicitly styled), and may cause problems on the terminal (e.g. with low-contrast text getting rounded off to the color of its background). So the ability to disable styling is useful.

nanna• 6 years ago

w3m just ignores colours, while eww applies the ones it recognizes, though in newer versions it can be disabled

Agreed! And to do so:

(setq shr-use-colors nil)

Edit: Colors in eww come from the Simple HTML Renderer (shr.el), so you need to disable its respective variable.

hpoe• 6 years ago

So I've been learning Emacs for a bit now and was just thinking about trying to figure out how to web browsing in emacs as a browser is the only other program I need right now. Gotta give this a try see how it works.

ews• 6 years ago

Make sure you also try Xwidget browsing, which has become my de factor browser while at work https://emacsnotes.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/why-a-minimal-br...

psibi• 6 years ago

Is there any way to get Xwidget based browser apart from trying to compiling Emacs (for a Linux environment) ?

Also, if it's only available via the compile yourself route - how long does the compilation take in a 4-core Intel based system ?

konjin2• 6 years ago

It works badly in most cases. Hacker News and Google are at the limit of what's usable. For a very lose definition of limit.

mickeyp• 6 years ago

It works well for documentation and general reading, especially if you press `R` to engage readability mode, that attemps to strip out all but the main body of text.

codygman• 6 years ago

Related, xwidget browser in emacs with keyboard navigation, etc:

https://github.com/BlueFlo0d/xwwp/tree/xwwp-ace-dev

johanvts3• 6 years ago

This looks promising. Thanks for sharing.

ginko• 6 years ago

I wanted to try that a while ago but didn't get it to work.

johanvts3• 6 years ago

I use it every now and then, but I think its missing a few things to be really great.

1. Its slow. I don't know if it just "feels" slow due to lack of visuals or if it is really slow. I suspect it loads a lot of things that never gets rendered anyway.

2. It needs some smarter focusing. Each page normally has a few screens of garbled menus etc. to scroll past before getting to the content. Maybe filtering out some html tags would be enough.

josteink2• 6 years ago

It needs some smarter focusing. Each page normally has a few screens of garbled menus etc. to scroll past before getting to the content. Maybe filtering out some html tags would be enough.

There’s (of course) an Elisp command for this. I cant’t remember it’s name now though.

Symbiote• 6 years ago

It is literally the fourth thing mentioned in the linked documentation.

noufalibrahim2• 6 years ago

This is more like a novelty feature to showcase the "power" of elisp. I haven't tried it but it's not really going to compare with normal browsers like chrome and even FF. There might be some use cases for things like viewing well structured HTML documentation or browsing a few sites but apart from that, I'm not sure what the value is.

I'm a long time Emacs users and it's quite frustrating to see how hard it is to use ecosystems of modern languages/frameworks like vue etc. I'm not that familiar with the ecosystem so it might my fault but this is my impression. I actually shifted to vscode to do this. If energy like this were spent there, I think it'd help adoption and usage much more.

konjin2• 6 years ago

    Posting from Emacs
    ==================

    It works well enough to post in hacker news. You just need to
    enter all the text in another buffer first, add a line of blank
    spaces at the top, and then kill and yank into the text area. As
    far as I can tell you can copy the way that org-mode deals with
    src-blocks to automate it, but this works well enough for me for
    now.

    It even works in emacspeak, which is kind of amazing. I have a
    blind accessible webbrowser inside an editor without even trying.

    (define identity
      (lambda (x)
        x))

    Even the scheme and paredit-modes work. Essentially it lets you
    author plain text emails as HN comments.

    +--------------------------+-------------------------------+
    |Pros                      |Cons                           |
    +--------------------------+-------------------------------+
    |You can make things look  |You can waste a lot of time.   |
    |amazing.                  |                               |
    +--------------------------+-------------------------------+
    |You can use whatever text |You have to choose what format |
    |mode you think is best.   |you like best: org vs md vs    |
    |                          |rest.                          |
    +--------------------------+-------------------------------+

josteink2• 6 years ago

It’s also good for documentation and stuff like Stack overflow.

You don’t need JS for all web-content.

taeric• 6 years ago

I find it sad that "well structured HTML" is listed as a clear outlier.

noufalibrahim2• 6 years ago

I do too. But I think that ship has sailed.

mssdvd• 6 years ago

Have you ever tried LSP?

fiddlerwoaroof• 6 years ago

I found tide-mode with RJSX to be mostly equivalent to VSCode (It uses the same language server as vscode, so feature-wise, it’s very close).

I had a really weird experience here: I liked VSCode, and almost switched to VSCode for JS and emacs for everything else. On a whim, I found tide-mode and tried it out. I thought “this works pretty well, but it seems slower than VSCode, and more flaky”. Then, I switched back to VSCode for a while and I realized that it had almost all the same issues I had in emacs (I forget what they are, it’s been a while). So, I left VSCode and have been using emacs happily do JS for the last couple years.

rukuu001• 6 years ago

I can’t think of a more perfect name

mlang23• 6 years ago

EWW is a godsent, very cool. Nice replacement for emacs-w3, which was very slow to render.

abdullahkhalids2• 6 years ago

EWW: Emacs Web Wowser

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