Norman Walsh has an interesting post in which he discusses discovering browsing in Emacs. More specifically, he discovered how to follow a link in an Email and have the result displayed in Emacs. He’s using WebKit with Xwidgets so that means more than just using EWW.
In his setup, which judging from the screenshot is on a Mac, typing return on a link in an email renders the link in HTML in the Emacs buffer. He doesn’t say what email client he’s using but with mu4e, which I use, that doesn’t happen. Rather, the link opens in the browser. At first I thought that I must have some sort of configuration item causing the difference but I couldn’t find anything. In any event, it doesn’t matter for mu4e because if it detects you have Xwidgets installed it will automatically include a binding (ax) to render the email in HTML. From there, you can follow any other links by clicking on them.
That’s pretty nice, but it gets better. I also have elfeed-webkit installed so that I can read my elfeed RSS entries in HTML as well. What actually happens is that elfeed-webkit follows the source link in the RSS and renders it in HTML. You can configure it to automatically include or exclude specific sites if you need to.
The takeaway from all this is that it’s possible to render emails, elfeed entries, and various other links in HTML directly in an Emacs buffer. Walsh discovered one aspect of a much larger field of possibilities. Emacs has gotten pretty good at handling HTML within Emacs. There are still a few dark corners but things are getting better and better. I’m looking forward to the day I can finally ditch my browser.