You can open a URL or search the web with the command M-x eww.
If the input doesn’t look like a URL or domain name the web will be
searched via eww-search-prefix. The default search engine is
DuckDuckGo. If you want to open a file
either prefix the file name with file:// or use the command
M-x eww-open-file.
If loading the URL was successful the buffer *eww* is opened
and the web page is rendered in it. You can leave EWW by pressing
q or exit the browser by calling eww-quit. To reload the
web page hit g (eww-reload). Pressing w
(eww-copy-page-url) will copy the current URL to the kill ring.
The R command (eww-readable) will attempt to determine
which part of the document contains the “readable” text, and will
only display this part. This usually gets rid of menus and the like.
The F command (eww-toggle-fonts) toggles whether to use
variable-pitch fonts or not. This sets the shr-use-fonts variable.
A URL under the point can be downloaded with d
(eww-download). The file will be written to the directory
specified in eww-download-directory (Default: ~/Downloads/).
EWW remembers the URLs you have visited to allow you to go back and
forth between them. By pressing l (eww-back-url) you go
to the previous URL. You can go forward again with r
(eww-forward-url). If you want an overview of your browsing
history press H (eww-list-histories) to open the history
buffer *eww history*. The history is lost when EWW is quit.
If you want to remember websites you can use bookmarks.
Along with the URLs visited, EWW also remembers both the rendered
page (as it appears in the buffer) and its source. This can take a
considerable amount of memory, so EWW discards the history entries to
keep their number within a set limit, as specified by
eww-history-limit; the default being 50. This variable could
also be set to nil to allow for the history list to grow
indefinitely.
PDFs are viewed inline, by default, with doc-view-mode, but
this can be customized by using the mailcap (see mailcap in Emacs MIME Manual)
mechanism, in particular mailcap-mime-data.
EWW allows you to bookmark URLs. Simply hit b
(eww-add-bookmark) to store a bookmark for the current website.
You can view stored bookmarks with B
(eww-list-bookmarks). This will open the bookmark buffer
*eww bookmarks*.
To get summary of currently opened EWW buffers, press S
(eww-list-buffers). The *eww buffers* buffer allows you
to quickly kill, flip through and switch to specific EWW buffer.
Although EWW and shr.el do their best to render webpages in GNU
Emacs some websites use features which can not be properly represented
or are not implemented (E.g., JavaScript). If you have trouble
viewing a website with EWW then hit &
(eww-browse-with-external-browser) inside the EWW buffer to
open the website in the external browser specified by
shr-external-browser. Some content types, such as video or
audio content, do not make sense to display in GNU Emacs at all. You
can tell EWW to open specific content automatically in an external
browser by customizing
eww-use-external-browser-for-content-type.