3 Advanced

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)url package. You can list existing cookies with C (url-cookie-list). For details about the Cookie handling See (url)Cookies.

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 (ImageMagick support required) then larger images are scaled down. You can block specific images completely by customizing shr-blocked-images.

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.

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.