Web browsing in Emacs

Emacs has a tendency to try and absorb all user-facing interactions I have with a computer. Some people seem able to separate “Emacs stuff” — like programming or using org-mode for note taking — but Emacs’ extendability makes me want to use it for everything. For a long time I have only really needed four different tools to do any kind of work at a computer:

1. GNU Emacs (with my personal config).
2. Tailscale to connect to my other machines.
3. Syncthing so that I have local access to my files¹.
4. A web browser (usually Firefox).

Quickly getting these four things up and running is usually my first priority when setting up a new machine, and they require different amounts of work. Critically Firefox requires a GUI environment in order to run, but it’s really quite unnecessary to get a desktop environment or tiling window manager up and running — and dealing with their conflicting keybinds — when all I’m going to be doing is working in Emacs perhaps 80% of the time, finding information or reading docs in Firefox 15% of the time, and using a stray terminal the remaining 5% (something I can easily replace with one of Emacs’ many terminal and shell solutions). This is why I like using exwm². Rather than using Emacs’ window manager capabilities to manage all your X windows it allows you to stay continually within Emacs and just treat any stray non-Emacs GUI programs within the same system. The solution then seems to try and subsume web browsing into my preëxisting workflow. There are many solutions to this, but I prefer ones that work with text as the primary medium as that is what Emacs is best oriented to work with.

eww is probably the most well-known of Emacs’ web browsing solutions, chiefly because it comes included with it. It is also the one I have the most experience with. I first came across eww as a consequence of reading about all of the crazy features included in Emacs by default like Tetris and Gnus. This isn’t very surprising; web browsers are some of the largest ubiquitous user-facing applications, so the fact that Emacs ships with one as a tangential feature is very surprising. However, these visions of browsing the web are often quickly crushed when one uses eww for the first time. It does not load any CSS, so websites do not look like one is accustomed to, and a lot of javascript functionality is non-functional.

I expect this experience — or at least something like it — to be somewhat universal amongst those who have even tried using eww. The modern web is built around these technologies, and going without them might seem almost impossible. But there is a place for eww in a modern workflow. The strength of Emacs is its power for working with text, and most media I interact with in a web browser is text. Emacs then is really the perfect environment for this. Reading and rewriting the content of web pages side-by-side using the same key-chords and user-interface allows for minimal context friction. But there are serious downsides, primarily ugly formatted headers and images. Most of the time eww can figure out the main readable content using the eww-readable function, bound to R by default. It’s meant to strip out long “navigation menus and the like”. In my experience it is either hit or miss. For some web pages like wikipedia it seems to work well (but only for some pages), but for others like github it just strips out the entire page. Thankfully it is bound to a convenient key and its easy to switch between the two views quickly. Images are probably one of the first things that stops people from using eww, with large ones causing the site to jump around as they cover the whole screen and then disappear. I solved this using ultra-scroll, which provides scrolling smoother than you could ever imagine in Emacs. It also allows you to scroll intuitively over images, rendering them as you would expect in a traditional browser like Firefox. With a slow network connection eww can have some problems with blocking, but this can be remedied by setting eww-retrieve-command:

(setq eww-retrieve-command
      '("chromium" "--headless" "--dump-dom"))

eww is written by Lars Ingebrigtsen of gnus fame. It uses the shr (simple HTML Renderer) program written in elisp to render HTML. He originally wrote shr to read elfeed entries in Emacs and eww is merely the addition of browsing (or wowsing) capability built on top of it. shr’s elisp nature is why it can sometimes struggle with complicated site layouts, but in my experience it is usually fast enough, especially with native compilation.

Generally eww can be surprisingly powerful, but most of its power (like Emacs itself) comes from its tight integration with other tooling and extensibility with elisp, rather than any amazing workflow it has built for you in advance. There is very little to learn, but a lot to master.

w3m can some sense be seen as the “hardcore” version of text-based web browsing in Emacs. w3m relies on the eponymous TUI program to render web pages in a way similar to Lynx, allegedly the world’s oldest continually-maintained web browser. w3m even comes with lynx bindings by default, although you can also change them to the included “info-like” ones. It allows for tabs, bookmarks, and other features one would expect in a modern browser. It also relies on interpreting the raw HTML to format the page, rather than rendering CSS. Like eww it also does not support javascript. Like I alluded to earlier, this is both a blessing and a curse, and reading just straight text can be very nice, both from a therapeutic minimalist way and a way to minimize context-switching. It is also nice and async by default, since it uses an external binary to fetch websites, not that it takes very long to load to begin with since it’s not running any heavy javascript. One nice difference between w3m and eww is also that the arrow keys navigate to the next link in the page by default, and the text in the buffer will resize itself whenever the buffer is resized³, something that is very handy if you’re using a package like golden-ratio that resizes windows depending on focus.

While I prefer text-based browsers that fit more seamlessly into the rest of Emacs, there are other solutions for more traditional browser experiences.