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Managed here to run eww, despite its requirements of libxml2-dev package BEFORE compiling and installing Emacs itself.

Have already browsed some websites, including some simple ones, only with basic Html an Css styling but coudn't find great utility in, once it renders quite strange browsing, finding w3m package much better for web browsing via command-line interface.

Anyway, what would eww be good for?

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  • The question is too broad, and is primarily opinion-based. – Drew Mar 25 at 14:42
  • eww uses the libxml library for parsing and the shr library (Simple Html Rendering) for rendering. One can easily hook into the renderer by buffer-locally setting the variable shr-external-rendering-functions. That allows one to easily (approximately) render formats that are almost HTML but have additional tags with additional functionality such as madcap FLARE. In madcap FLARE one has snippets, equations, variables, and much more. – Tobias Mar 25 at 18:25
  • And how that would be done, @Tobias? – Vincent33 Mar 26 at 14:06
  • I wrote "One can easily hook into the renderer..." and you asked "And how that would be done?". That is another question. This one is closed anyway and I cannot answer here. Proposed title for the follow-up: "How to render custom tags of HTML-like files with EWW" – Tobias Mar 26 at 14:19
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I don't have any experience with w3m, so I don't know how it compares, but I've found EWW to work OK for Wikipedia, so I occasionally use it for that.

As for what it's good for: I use it to read/browse the OCaml and Coq documentation for which I find it works about as well as my browser with the advantage that it's actually faster and that I can navigate it in the usual way.

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  • Yes, I think anything which provides documentation in (a reasonably basic) HTML format is likely to be nicest to browse in eww without leaving Emacs. Especially true when the docs are available for download so you can browse them locally. And then there's reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/9oi1e3/… – phils Mar 26 at 7:35

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