The other day I wrote about installing elfeed-webkit to render my RSS feed as proper HTML. I was pretty impressed with it when I first tried it and now I’m even more of a fan. Before elfeed-webkit, I spent a lot of time switching between Elfeed and Safari so that I could read interesting posts that came up in the feed. It doesn’t seem like it would take that much time but since the change, my RSS workflow seems faster and easier.
A secondary advantage is that Emacs has more functionality now that I have XWidgets enabled. At first I wondered if I could get eww to do a better job rendering sites by using Webkit. That turned out to be a bust but I did discover xwidget-webkit-broswse-url that will render a site in decent HTML but it’s not a proper Browser so it’s pretty much restricted to viewing a specific URL. You can follow links and control videos but there are no bookmarks, content filtering, or other Browser amenities. Still, it does help keep me in Emacs and a lot of times I just want to visit a page from Emacs and it works perfectly for that.
In my original post, I noted a couple of problems. The first was the possibility of being inundated with ads because of the lack of content filtering. That’s basically a nonissue for the sites I read although occasionally a feed item will send me off to a “commercial” site that does have a lot of intrusive pop-up adds but it doesn’t happen often.
The second problem was that I couldn’t get t to toggle elfeed-webkit on and off. I thought maybe something else was grabbing the t binding to I changed it to w but that didn’t work either. I solved that by binding a global key to toggle elfeed-webkit and that worked fine (but see below).
Finally, I recently upgraded my email client mu/mu4e and a helper function I wrote to display the post in eww stopped working. While investigating that, I discovered that mu4e will display an email with webkit, which is what I really want so I’m now using that instead of eww.
While investigating the email issue I discovered that the XWidget library does indeed capture the t key as well as the w key. The t doesn’t appear to do anything useful as its definition
(define-key map "t" (lambda () (interactive) (message "o"))) ;FIXME: ?!?
shows. I don’t know how it was working for Grabo; perhaps he’s using the Emacs 29 pretest and it has removed the useless binding. In any event, I simple changed my toggle key to x and now it works perfectly.
That leaves only one small problem. One of the sites I follow, Daring Fireball, has the unusual property that its RSS URL is not the site itself but the site it’s linking to. That means that I miss the Daring Fireball commentary and go straight to the linked site. I’m considering adding code to implement a tag that inhibits rather than enables elfeed-webkit. In the meantime, I’m simply toggling elfeed-webkit off when I get to a Daring Fireball post.
All in all, I’m really happy with elfeed-webkit and recommend it wholeheartedly.