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 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
(eww-copy-page-url) will copy the current URL to the
kill ring.
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.
A URL under the point can be downloaded with d
(eww-download). The file will be written to the
directory specified in eww-download-directory
(Default: ~/Downloads/).
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.
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
shr-external-browser. 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.