He’s back! After a long hiatus, Mike Zamansky has returned with another video in his Using Emacs Series. For those of you not following along, Zamansky recently retired and has gained a second wind. He has a series on using Elisp planned but in the meantime, he offers us a splendid video on using and installing elfeed-webkit.
I’ve written about elfeed-webkit before [1, 2] but there’s nothing like seeing it in action. Configuring and using elfeed-webkit is so simple that Zamansky originally thought there wasn’t enough for a video but then he realized that the hard part was compiling Emacs to support the XWidget library. That isn’t really hard but it can be fiddly and lots of folks seem unaware of how to do it.
Zamansky solves that with a demonstration of how to compile Emacs to support XWidgets and other options. Mostly it’s a matter of running configure with the proper options but if you haven’t compiled Emacs from source before, you’re probably going to be missing some required libraries. Zamansky walks us through that and then explains how to install elfeed-webkit. His demonstration of how to compile Emacs is specific to Mint Linux but should work, mutatis mutandis, for any Linux distribution. It’s pretty close to what I do to compile it under macOS except that downloading libraries is different.
The video is 24 minutes, 13 seconds so you’ll definitely need to schedule some time but, come on, it’s one of Zamansky’s videos so you know it’s worth your time. I second Zamansky’s conclusion that elfeed-webkit is a game changer. If you use RSS—and you should—and you read your feeds with elfeed you really, really need to check out elfeed-webkit.