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 or eww-open-file with a prefix
argument, as in C-u M-x eww, they 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 A command (eww-copy-alternate-url) copies the URL
of an alternate link on the current page into the kill ring. If the
page specifies multiple alternate links, this command prompts for one
of them in the minibuffer, with completion. Alternate links are
references that an HTML page may include to point to other
documents that act as its alternative representations. Notably,
HTML pages can use alternate links to point to their
translated versions and to RSS feeds. Alternate links
appear in the ‘<head>’ section of HTML pages as
‘<link>’ elements with ‘rel’ attribute equal to
‘``alternate''’; they are part of the page’s metadata and are not
visible in its rendered content.
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. If invoked with prefix argument, the
command will not make the new buffer the current one. 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.
When called interactively, this command toggles the display of the readable parts. With a positive prefix argument, this command always displays the readable parts, and with a zero or negative prefix, it always displays the full page.
If you want EWW to render a certain page in “readable” mode by
default, you can add a regular expression matching its URL to
eww-readable-urls. Each entry can either be a regular expression
in string form or a cons cell of the form
(regexp . readability). If readability is
non-nil, this behaves the same as the string form; otherwise,
URLs matching regexp will never be displayed in readable mode by
default. For example, you can use this to make all pages default to
readable mode, except for a few outliers:
(setq eww-readable-urls '(("https://example\\.com/" . nil)
".*"))
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.
By default, when browsing to a new page from a “historical” one
(i.e. a page loaded by navigating back via eww-back-url), EWW
will first delete any history entries newer than the current page. This
is the same behavior as most other web browsers. You can change this by
customizing eww-before-browse-history-function to another value.
For example, setting it to ignore will preserve the existing
history entries and simply prepend the new page to the history list.
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.