Making Emacs’ EWW browser slightly more user-friendly

The Emacs Web Wowser (eww) is one of the more well-known browsers available for Emacs. Full disclaimer, it only renders HTML, no CSS and JS. Still, it can be pretty useful, especially for conveniently looking up documentation or advice online without having to leave Emacs.

I, for one, also quite often find myself reading articles from my RSS feed reader in it, if the full text isn’t included in the RSS entry.

To serve these purposes well, I have invested a bit into making EWW a bit more like a normal browser.

For example, I have EWW set up so that it is the only mode that actually uses a tabs UI, which is nice to retain an overview of what you are researching in a way separate from the buffer list that is likely to include all sorts of other stuff.

 (straight-use-package 'centaur-tabs)
  (centaur-tabs-mode 1)

  (setq centaur-tabs-buffer-list-function
        (lambda ()
          (seq-filter (lambda (buffer)
                        (with-current-buffer buffer
                          (eq major-mode 'eww-mode)))
                      (buffer-list))))

  (with-eval-after-load 'centaur-tabs
    (global-set-key (kbd "C-c .") #'centaur-tabs-ace-jump))

I also created some keybindings to make certain types of use easier

  (defun my/eww-new-buffer ()
    "Open EWW in a new buffer by simulating the prefix argument."
    (interactive)
    ;; '(4) corresponds to C-u -> use a new buffer
    (let ((current-prefix-arg '(4)))
      (call-interactively 'eww)))

  (global-set-key (kbd "C-c e") 'my/eww-new-buffer)

  ;; making sure M-Ret works
  (with-eval-after-load 'eww
    (setq eww-suggest-uris
        '(eww-links-at-point url-get-url-at-point eww-current-url)))

Then, there is the immensely useful ace-link for jumping to links Vimium style

  (use-package ace-link
    :straight t
    :init
    (with-eval-after-load 'eww
      (define-key eww-mode-map (kbd "f") 'ace-link-eww)))

Finally, I made a function to re-direct Reddit links to the “Old Reddit” version (HTML-only), since modern Reddit requires JS to populate thread responses.

  (defun eww-redirects (url)
    "Rewrite URLs to use JS-free frontends."
    (cond
     ;; Reddit -> old.reddit.com
     ((string-match-p "reddit\\.com" url)
      (replace-regexp-in-string "https?://\\(www\\.\\)?reddit\\.com" "https://old.reddit.com" url))

     ;; return original URL if no match found
     (t url)))

  (add-to-list 'eww-url-transformers 'eww-redirects)

For me, this is good enough at the moment. It’s nice to be able to do much of my web-surfing in Emacs in a way that I can completely make my own.

If you haven’t tried these packages before, definitely check them out!