This file documents the GNU Emacs Web Wowser (EWW) package.
Copyright © 2014–2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with the Front-Cover Texts being “A GNU Manual,” and with the Back-Cover Texts as in (a) below. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License.”
(a) The FSF’s Back-Cover Text is: “You have the freedom to copy and modify this GNU manual.”
EWW, the Emacs Web Wowser, is a web browser for GNU Emacs that provides a simple, no-frills experience that focuses on readability. It loads, parses, and displays web pages using shr.el. It can display images inline, if Emacs was built with image support, but there is no support for CSS or JavaScript.
To use EWW, you need to use an Emacs built with libxml2
support.
You can open a URL or search the web with the command M-x eww.
If the input doesn’t look like a URL or domain name the web will be
searched via eww-search-prefix
. The default search engine is
DuckDuckGo. If you want to open a file
either prefix the file name with file://
or use the command
M-x eww-open-file.
If you invoke eww
with a prefix argument, as in C-u M-x eww, it will create a new EWW buffer instead of reusing the
default one, which is normally called *eww*.
If loading the URL was successful the buffer *eww* is opened
and the web page is rendered in it. You can leave EWW by pressing
q or exit the browser by calling eww-quit. To reload the
web page hit g (eww-reload
).
Pressing w when point is on a link will call
shr-maybe-probe-and-copy-url
, which copies this link’s
URL to the kill ring. If point is not on a link, pressing
w calls eww-copy-page-url
, which will copy the current
page’s URL to the kill ring instead.
The M-RET command (eww-open-in-new-buffer
) opens the
URL at point in a new EWW buffer, akin to opening a link in a new
“tab” in other browsers. When global-tab-line-mode
is
enabled, this buffer is displayed in the tab on the window tab line.
When tab-bar-mode
is enabled, a new tab is created on the frame
tab bar.
The R command (eww-readable
) will attempt to determine
which part of the document contains the “readable” text, and will
only display this part. This usually gets rid of menus and the like.
The F command (eww-toggle-fonts
) toggles whether to use
variable-pitch fonts or not. This sets the shr-use-fonts
variable.
The M-C command (eww-toggle-colors
) toggles whether to use
HTML-specified colors or not. This sets the shr-use-colors
variable.
The M-I command (eww-toggle-images
, capital letter i)
toggles whether to display images or not. This also sets the
shr-inhibit-images
variable.
A URL can be downloaded with d (eww-download
). This
will download the link under point if there is one, or else the URL of
the current page. The file will be written to the directory specified
by eww-download-directory
(default: ~/Downloads/, if it
exists; otherwise as specified by the ‘DOWNLOAD’ XDG
directory)).
EWW remembers the URLs you have visited to allow you to go back and
forth between them. By pressing l (eww-back-url
) you go
to the previous URL. You can go forward again with r
(eww-forward-url
). If you want an overview of your browsing
history press H (eww-list-histories
) to open the history
buffer *eww history*. The history is lost when EWW is quit.
If you want to remember websites you can use bookmarks.
Along with the URLs visited, EWW also remembers both the rendered
page (as it appears in the buffer) and its source. This can take a
considerable amount of memory, so EWW discards the history entries to
keep their number within a set limit, as specified by
eww-history-limit
; the default being 50. This variable could
also be set to nil
to allow for the history list to grow
indefinitely.
PDFs are viewed inline, by default, with doc-view-mode
, but
this can be customized by using the mailcap (see mailcap in Emacs MIME Manual)
mechanism, in particular mailcap-mime-data
.
EWW allows you to bookmark URLs. Simply hit b
(eww-add-bookmark
) to store a bookmark for the current website.
You can view stored bookmarks with B
(eww-list-bookmarks
). This will open the bookmark buffer
*eww bookmarks*.
To get summary of currently opened EWW buffers, press S
(eww-list-buffers
). The *eww buffers* buffer allows you
to quickly kill, flip through and switch to specific EWW buffer. To
switch EWW buffers through a minibuffer prompt, press s
(eww-switch-to-buffer
).
Although EWW and shr.el do their best to render webpages in GNU
Emacs some websites use features which can not be properly represented
or are not implemented (e.g., JavaScript). If you have trouble
viewing a website with EWW then hit &
(eww-browse-with-external-browser
) inside the EWW buffer to
open the website in the external browser specified by
browse-url-secondary-browser-function
. Some content types,
such as video or audio content, do not make sense to display in GNU
Emacs at all. You can tell EWW to open specific content automatically
in an external browser by customizing
eww-use-external-browser-for-content-type
.
EWW normally uses url-retrieve
to fetch the HTML
before rendering it, and url-retrieve-synchronously
when
the value of eww-retrieve-command
is sync
. It can
sometimes be convenient to use an external program to do this, and
eww-retrieve-command
should then be a list that specifies
a command and the parameters. For instance, to use the Chromium
browser, you could say something like this:
(setq eww-retrieve-command '("chromium" "--headless" "--dump-dom"))
The command should return the HTML on standard output, and the data should use UTF-8 as the charset.
You can view the source of a website with v
(eww-view-source
). This will open a new buffer
*eww-source* and insert the source. The buffer will be set to
html-mode
if available.
EWW handles cookies through the url package
package. You can list existing cookies with C
(url-cookie-list
). For details about the Cookie handling
See (url)Cookies.
Many HTML pages have images embedded in them, and EWW will
download most of these by default. When fetching images, cookies can
be sent and received, and these can be used to track users. To
control when to send cookies when retrieving these images, the
shr-cookie-policy
variable can be used. The default value,
same-origin
, means that EWW will only send cookies when
fetching images that originate from the same source as the
HTML page. nil
means “never send cookies when
retrieving these images” and t
means “always send cookies
when retrieving these images”.
When following links in EWW, URLs that match the
eww-use-browse-url
regexp will be passed to browse-url
instead of EWW handling them itself. The action can be further
customized by altering browse-url-handlers
.
The header line of the EWW buffer can be changed by customizing
eww-header-line-format
. The format replaces %t
with the
title of the website and %u
with the URL.
The D command (eww-toggle-paragraph-direction
) toggles
the paragraphs direction between left-to-right and right-to-left
text. This can be useful on web pages that display right-to-left test
(like Arabic and Hebrew), but where the web pages don’t explicitly
state the directionality.
Loading random images from the web can be problematic due to their
size or content. By customizing shr-max-image-proportion
you
can set the maximal image proportion in relation to the window they
are displayed in. E.g., 0.7 means an image is allowed to take up 70%
of the width and height. If Emacs supports image scaling, then larger
images are scaled down. You can block specific images completely by
customizing shr-blocked-images
.
You can control image display by customizing
shr-inhibit-images
. If this variable is nil
, display
the “ALT” text of images instead.
EWW (or rather its HTML renderer shr
) uses the colors declared
in the HTML page, but adjusts them if needed to keep a certain minimum
contrast. If that is still too low for you, you can customize the
variables shr-color-visible-distance-min
and
shr-color-visible-luminance-min
to get a better contrast.
By default, the max width used when rendering is 120 characters, but
this can be adjusted by changing the shr-max-width
variable.
If a specified width is preferred no matter what the width of the
window is, shr-width
can be set. If both variables are
nil
, the window width will always be used.
The HTML attribute aria-hidden
is meant to tell screen
readers to ignore a tag’s contents. You can customize the variable
shr-discard-aria-hidden
to tell shr
to ignore such tags.
This can be useful when using a screen reader on the output of
shr
(e.g., on EWW buffer text). It can be useful even when not
using a screen reader, since web authors often put this attribute on
non-essential decorative elements.
In addition to maintaining the history at run-time, EWW will also save the partial state of its buffers (the URIs and the titles of the pages visited) in the desktop file if one is used. See Saving Emacs Sessions in The GNU Emacs Manual.
EWW history may sensibly contain multiple entries for the same page
URI. At run-time, these entries may still have different associated
point positions or the actual Web page contents.
The latter, however, tend to be overly large to preserve in the
desktop file, so they get omitted, thus rendering the respective
entries entirely equivalent. By default, such duplicate entries are
not saved. Setting eww-desktop-remove-duplicates
to nil
will force EWW to save them anyway.
Restoring EWW buffers’ contents may prove to take too long to
finish. When the eww-restore-desktop
variable is set to
nil
(the default), EWW will not try to reload the last visited
Web page when the buffer is restored from the desktop file, thus
allowing for faster Emacs start-up times. When set to t
,
restoring the buffers will also initiate the reloading of such pages.
The EWW buffer restored from the desktop file but not yet reloaded
will contain a prompt, as specified by the
eww-restore-reload-prompt
variable. The value of this variable
will be passed through substitute-command-keys
upon each use,
thus allowing for the use of the usual substitutions, such as
\[eww-reload]
for the current key binding of the
eww-reload
command.
If the eww-auto-rename-buffer
user option is non-nil
,
EWW buffers will be renamed after rendering a document. If this is
title
, rename based on the title of the document. If this is
url
, rename based on the URL of the document. This
can also be a user-defined function, which is called with no
parameters in the EWW buffer, and should return a string.
EWW runs the URLs through eww-url-transformers
before using
them. This user option is a list of functions, where each function is
called with the URL as the parameter, and should return the (possibly)
transformed URL. By default, this variable contains
eww-remove-tracking
, which removes the common ‘utm_’
trackers from links.
If Emacs has been built with xwidget support, EWW can use that to
display ‘<video>’ elements. However, this support is still
experimental, and on some systems doesn’t work (and even worse) may
crash your Emacs, so this feature is off by default. If you wish to
switch it on, set shr-use-xwidgets-for-media
to a
non-nil
value.
It can be convenient to start eww directly from the command line. The
eww-browse
function can be used for that:
emacs -f eww-browse https://gnu.org
This also allows registering Emacs as a MIME handler for the ‘"text/x-uri"’ media type. How to do that varies between systems, but typically you’d register the handler to call ‘"emacs -f eww-browse %u"’.
EWW was originally written by Lars Ingebrigtsen, known for his work on
Gnus. He started writing an Emacs HTML rendering library,
shr.el
, to read blogs in Gnus. He eventually added a web
browser front end and HTML form support. Which resulted in EWW, the
Emacs Web Wowser. EWW was announced on 16 June 2013:
https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2013/06/16/eww/.
EWW was then moved from the Gnus repository to GNU Emacs and several developers started contributing to it as well.
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After eww has rendered the data in the buffer,
eww-after-render-hook
is called. It can be used to alter the
contents, for instance.