Emacs Is My Browser

Shameless plug time: About a year and a half ago, I wrote [1] about a way of squeezing more text onto the screen, using Emacs, that plays well with eww and does a reasonable job of preserving readability. Basically, it's a hack that builds on follow-mode to quickly convert a frame into a columnar display for long buffers, with interactive adjustment of the number of columns.

[1] https://www.reindeereffect.com/0002

The most important part of this is toward the end, and whether you consider it a limitation or a feature is a matter of perspective: the modern commercial web does not play nice with this. So static HTML and blogs yes, Reddit and most anything commercial no.

You can actually get other close-to-browser experiences with stuff like xwidget and embedded WebKit (https://emacsdocs.org/docs/emacs/Embedded-WebKit-Widgets) but generally it’s not worth the fight for commercial sites these days; everything is vibed and only tested against Chrome, so if you’re lucky they’ll load in other Chromium browsers and _maybe_ Firefox.

Richard Stallman (RMS) also uses the Web from Emacs. But I believe he pastes URLs into a program that sends him a screen copy by email (at least as of approx. 20 years ago, when I last saw him in person).

His motive is not mindfulness, but ideology.

I have an old - and I mean old - laptop sit in my bathroom I use for reading random-ish Wikipedia articles, and it's too puny to run any mainstream browser. I used to use Dillo, which is fine resource-wise, but I grew annoyed over time that it does not have session management.

Then, recently, it hit me - w3m-mode has both tabs and session management. It somehow even displays images more reliably than Dillo. I wouldn't use it as my main browser on the desktop, but for my specific use case, it's perfect.

The one thing above all that is urgently necessary is a content-addressable replacement for (or layer above) HTTP(S) which is genuinely ready to go and has adoption which is meaningful and moving in the right direction. Unfortunately we seem to be going in the wrong direction there right now. Cute browser setups and retro-chic web servers are fun and a nice gesture but they won't get us there.

Tried gemini browsers again recently, and while I appreciate the zen / distraction free system, all I was thinking about was bringing emacs ux around it. Modern web doesn't mesh well with my brain.

It makes me think that having a local semantic AI layer in your browser would be cool, to strip away ads and just show you the content you want to see (like reader mode).

Paired with a local on-device model would be pretty sweet.

I appreciate the post though I am not an eMacs user. The spirit is much aligned with my own desire to use the web this way. Well done getting Laborem Exercens on the homepage.

I've been working on some open source tools for this that you might find interesting:

https://github.com/sstraust/simpleweb

I don't want to hate on this particular post, but I really dislike the great number of blog posts, videos, and articles that have a title which says "Why I do X in <some unconventional way>" where upon reading the blog post hoping to learn some useful feature that say, browsing the web in Emacs affords you (like closer integration between research and writing for example), you learn that the benefit in question is actually that the method is less useful than conventional means.

I think the idea that you do something in a more difficult or less convenient manner for the sake of "mindfulness" or "focus" is well-established, and what I hope for (and am always disappointed by the lack of) when reading such blog posts is an actually useful feature of the unconventional method in question.

The title of this blog post promises some usefulness from using Emacs as your browser, and upon reading, you discover that the "usefulness" is the inconvenience and impracticality of using it that way.

I went through trying to use emacs for everything years ago and had a blast but ultimately it just didn't work out. You'd have to be stallman level crazy to really do it but I applaud anyone trying or doing it.

Would love to try to explore emacs again, but the emacs pinky shenanigans are such a turn-off. Simultaneously the most efficient and possibly the least ergonomic way to navigate a computer?

If you're on MacOS and tempted by Emacs, the homebrew emacs-plus package will make it slightly less painful but bear in mind it really works best and fastest on proper *nix machines

> The internet is just a delivery mechanism, and for people that see it for what it really is, the internet has never been more alive. I truly recommend using the internet as if it was 1999.

Well, he has a point - Google controlling so much of the www is bad.

On the other hand, it's not all bad only. While more and more youtube videos are crap, there are useful youtube videos. Many people use it for learning too and often that works as well. Using emacs as browser really does not fix the issue. Also, emacs needs a proper editor if it ever wants to be a good operating system.

I think you're in for a lot of trouble if you do this without heavy-duty sandboxing in 2026. There is going to be an Emacs security apocalypse soon.

FWIW, you can login to here (https://news.ycombinator.com) using eww. The only minor issue is you are really limited to 1 line if you want to comment. And seems you cannot vote either.

I have yet to figure out how to get around those issues.

And a big plus, eww is great for resource limited systems like old 32bit laptops.

> I have seen in my own use of the modern browser (chromium/firefox) that it is far too easy to get distracted - too easy to get off track and fall down rabbit holes that take over my day.

I have a very easy solution for that: zero sound output from my main desktop/workstation computer. I mean: technically I leave the sound drivers and the sound on, but there's nothing connected to the output (so speakers / no headphone).

The deep underlying philosophical question being: "If a PC outputs audio to nothing plugged into it, does it make a sound?"

The answer doesn't really matters though. What matters is that it's a great way to not get distracted.

My main desktop emits, on purpose, no sound since... 20 years?

For the rest, I've got laptops.

Unfortunately GNU Emacs is single-threaded and blocking by design and not well suited for this kind of thing. Using it for things like browser or window manager usually ends in either weird hacks or uncomfortable pauses.

I have more hope in projects like lem which implement new emacsen from scratch.

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