Emacs Tip: EWW Readable View (publ. 2024-10-22)

I want to highlight some perhaps overlooked functionality of EWW, the Emacs Web browser. The functionality I am referring to is the Readable view.

EWW is not a good browser for Web Apps, as it doesn't handle JavaScript and dynamic content and all that. But it is a very nice Web browser if you just want to read a normal Web page, i.e., an HTML page with cleartext content, like many blog posts and such like.

Or, at least it would be, except usually when you visit a page in EWW, you'll first have to scroll through 18 screens worth of menu links and banners and such that EWW has tried to translate for you into plain text content. This is where the Readable functionality comes in.

When you are viewing any Web page in EWW, just press "R" (capital "r") to activate the eww-readable function. EWW will reformat the page, removing from the display everything that it believes is not part of the main Web page text, such as navigation menus. This is much nicer and cleaner. To switch back, just press "R" again.

To make this view the default, customize the variable "eww-readable-urls", adding the regular expression ".*". This means all URLs will be loaded into EWW this way. For customizing this further to specific patterns of URLs, see the built-in documentation for eww-readable-urls.

If you really do need the navigation links and such, you can of course press "R" again to get them back. Or more likely what you will want to do is press "&" (eww-browse-with-external-browser) to reopen the page in your external Web browser (Firefox or what have you).

Incidentally, you can make EWW your default Emacs Web browser choice by customizing the variable "browse-url-browser-function". And this integrates nicely with the Elfeed package, which is a nice way to track and view your Web feeds.

skeeto / elfeed repository

Now I am using Elpher for browsing Gemini content, and EWW for (readable) Web content, and I am having a good experience with that. I have a little trouble because Elpher and EWW use slightly different navigation key-bindings, e.g., for moving back to the previously visited page. But I imagine I could synchronize that if I got around to it.

I am still working on finishing my EmacsConf 2024 talks. I completed my first talk, "Watering Your (Digital) Plant With Emacs Timers", and that is uploaded. But I am still working on my longer "Emacs as a Shell" video.

EmacsConf home page

Copyright

CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed