The most important part of this is toward the end, and whether you consider it a limitation or a feature is a matter of perspective: the modern commercial web does not play nice with this. So static HTML and blogs yes, Reddit and most anything commercial no.
You can actually get other close-to-browser experiences with stuff like xwidget and embedded WebKit (https://emacsdocs.org/docs/emacs/Embedded-WebKit-Widgets) but generally it’s not worth the fight for commercial sites these days; everything is vibed and only tested against Chrome, so if you’re lucky they’ll load in other Chromium browsers and _maybe_ Firefox.
Richard Stallman (RMS) also uses the Web from Emacs. But I believe he pastes URLs into a program that sends him a screen copy by email (at least as of approx. 20 years ago, when I last saw him in person).
I don't want to hate on this particular post, but I really dislike the great number of blog posts, videos, and articles that have a title which says "Why I do X in <some unconventional way>" where upon reading the blog post hoping to learn some useful feature that say, browsing the web in Emacs affords you (like closer integration between research and writing for example), you learn that the benefit in question is actually that the method is less useful than conventional means.
I think the idea that you do something in a more difficult or less convenient manner for the sake of "mindfulness" or "focus" is well-established, and what I hope for (and am always disappointed by the lack of) when reading such blog posts is an actually useful feature of the unconventional method in question.
The title of this blog post promises some usefulness from using Emacs as your browser, and upon reading, you discover that the "usefulness" is the inconvenience and impracticality of using it that way.
> you learn that the benefit in question is actually that the method is less useful than conventional means. … hope for … an actually useful feature of the unconventional method in question.
People write these things, and use these methods, specifically because they don't conceive of usefulness the same way you do.
In this case, the justification offered doesn't mention all the various keybinds that have been pushed down to the "how" section. But clearly the simplicity is a feature:
> D will download images locally, b goes back a page, a will save bookmarks. All of this makes browsing in eww truly enjoyable.
The point is the same as usual for TUIs: you don't have to switch over to the mouse and hunt out a button, as the necessary key is always literally at hand.
People who find this sort of thing "truly enjoyable" (what clearer statement is there of featurefulness!) commonly take it for granted and don't explain the virtues of it very well. That sort of explanation is found in think pieces about TUI design more generally.
TFA describes a goal of avoiding distraction. That is not at all the same thing as "inconvenience and impracticality". Clearly the author finds these keybinds quite convenient and practical. It's just that they don't cover a bunch of web interactions that you perhaps value, but the author doesn't.
I'll go through some personal upsides to using eww.
The main utility I see in browsing the web through emacs is the potential to integrate it into your workflow. You can have your code/notes open in one buffer and have the website in another, which is useful for documentation, or an article you're following along, etc.
With gptel, it's easy to highlight part of a blogpost and ask an llm a question about it, or get it to rewrite or annotate the whole page.
An added bonus is that your keybindings for the rest of emacs are also valid here. (Though for that I've recently started using Glide, a firefox fork, and set all of its keymap to match my emacs bindings)
>You can have your code/notes open in one buffer and have the website in another, which is useful for documentation, or an article you're following along, etc.
I’m curious what the difference is between that and having pinned windows in Ubuntu
For example I’ll have sublime text, one terminal, a notepad, and a firefox window with multiple tabs, pinned to the four corners of my desktop
Everything You describe is possible without emacs so I’m genuinely trying to understand the appeal
Unfortunately GNU Emacs is single-threaded and blocking by design and not well suited for this kind of thing. Using it for things like browser or window manager usually ends in either weird hacks or uncomfortable pauses.
I have more hope in projects like lem which implement new emacsen from scratch.
Emacs has asynchronous IO support which is more than sufficient for networking. It is up to the relevant mode or application that runs on top of Emacs to take advantage of it and not all of them do (for example, Gnus).
There are also various multi-processing configurations for even more flexibility: multiple Emacs processes that can coordinate, Emacs modules over a C API which can create native threads outside of Emacs and so on. What Emacs lacks is parallelism inside a single Emacs process, which is arguably not needed and would be a net negative from a safety, ease of development and debugging point of view.
Lem is nice but nowhere near as nice as modern Emacs (and probably never will be). Emacs Lisp isn't Common Lisp but has evolved significantly and the remaining differences don't really matter in practice because Emacs momentum, massive user base and ecosystem are a tremendous advantage.
Would love to try to explore emacs again, but the emacs pinky shenanigans are such a turn-off. Simultaneously the most efficient and possibly the least ergonomic way to navigate a computer?
> but the emacs pinky shenanigans are such a turn-off
Do you touch type? You’re meant to use the modifier keys on the opposite side rather than stretching your pinky to press them. Also there are packages such as god-mode which help.
You can use "evil mode" for Vi-like bindings if you prefer. There are a number of Emacs "distributions" like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs which come preconfigured for Vi-like editing.
+100 here. Going full evil+spacemacs (for self-documenting arpeggios instead of chord sets) a bit over a decade ago transformed Emacs from a fun toy to a fulltime environment for me.
many people use homerow mods, but I haven't tried them personally.
if you happen to use a thinkpad and don't use the trackpoint, you can remap the two mouse buttons above the trackpad to ctrl and alt using keyd on linux. this completely solved RSI on my laptop.
FWIW, you can login to here (https://news.ycombinator.com) using eww. The only minor issue is you are really limited to 1 line if you want to comment. And seems you cannot vote either.
I have yet to figure out how to get around those issues.
And a big plus, eww is great for resource limited systems like old 32bit laptops.
You can actually get other close-to-browser experiences with stuff like xwidget and embedded WebKit (https://emacsdocs.org/docs/emacs/Embedded-WebKit-Widgets) but generally it’s not worth the fight for commercial sites these days; everything is vibed and only tested against Chrome, so if you’re lucky they’ll load in other Chromium browsers and _maybe_ Firefox.
His motive is not mindfulness, but ideology.
I think the idea that you do something in a more difficult or less convenient manner for the sake of "mindfulness" or "focus" is well-established, and what I hope for (and am always disappointed by the lack of) when reading such blog posts is an actually useful feature of the unconventional method in question.
The title of this blog post promises some usefulness from using Emacs as your browser, and upon reading, you discover that the "usefulness" is the inconvenience and impracticality of using it that way.
People write these things, and use these methods, specifically because they don't conceive of usefulness the same way you do.
In this case, the justification offered doesn't mention all the various keybinds that have been pushed down to the "how" section. But clearly the simplicity is a feature:
> D will download images locally, b goes back a page, a will save bookmarks. All of this makes browsing in eww truly enjoyable.
The point is the same as usual for TUIs: you don't have to switch over to the mouse and hunt out a button, as the necessary key is always literally at hand.
People who find this sort of thing "truly enjoyable" (what clearer statement is there of featurefulness!) commonly take it for granted and don't explain the virtues of it very well. That sort of explanation is found in think pieces about TUI design more generally.
TFA describes a goal of avoiding distraction. That is not at all the same thing as "inconvenience and impracticality". Clearly the author finds these keybinds quite convenient and practical. It's just that they don't cover a bunch of web interactions that you perhaps value, but the author doesn't.
The main utility I see in browsing the web through emacs is the potential to integrate it into your workflow. You can have your code/notes open in one buffer and have the website in another, which is useful for documentation, or an article you're following along, etc.
With gptel, it's easy to highlight part of a blogpost and ask an llm a question about it, or get it to rewrite or annotate the whole page.
With macros you can do basic automation, like this webscraping example here: https://nickdrozd.github.io/2018/10/17/web-scraping.html
An added bonus is that your keybindings for the rest of emacs are also valid here. (Though for that I've recently started using Glide, a firefox fork, and set all of its keymap to match my emacs bindings)
I’m curious what the difference is between that and having pinned windows in Ubuntu
For example I’ll have sublime text, one terminal, a notepad, and a firefox window with multiple tabs, pinned to the four corners of my desktop
Everything You describe is possible without emacs so I’m genuinely trying to understand the appeal
I have more hope in projects like lem which implement new emacsen from scratch.
There are also various multi-processing configurations for even more flexibility: multiple Emacs processes that can coordinate, Emacs modules over a C API which can create native threads outside of Emacs and so on. What Emacs lacks is parallelism inside a single Emacs process, which is arguably not needed and would be a net negative from a safety, ease of development and debugging point of view.
Look at the recently introduced canvas API (https://monadicsheep.org/blog/an-introduction-to-canvas-in-e...) for some examples of what's possible via that flexibility.
Lem is nice but nowhere near as nice as modern Emacs (and probably never will be). Emacs Lisp isn't Common Lisp but has evolved significantly and the remaining differences don't really matter in practice because Emacs momentum, massive user base and ecosystem are a tremendous advantage.
Do you touch type? You’re meant to use the modifier keys on the opposite side rather than stretching your pinky to press them. Also there are packages such as god-mode which help.
if you happen to use a thinkpad and don't use the trackpoint, you can remap the two mouse buttons above the trackpad to ctrl and alt using keyd on linux. this completely solved RSI on my laptop.
I have yet to figure out how to get around those issues.
And a big plus, eww is great for resource limited systems like old 32bit laptops.