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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Emacs has a web browser?

> Emacs has a web browser?

At one point there were only two web browsers in the world, one was Mosaic (Mozilla is short for Mosaic Killer) and one was W3 (the emacs web browser).

I don't think Mosaic was the original browser and I believe others predated Emacs, such as Lynx. Here's Wikipedia's version of events, for what it's worth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser

Um, what about WorldWideWeb, the original NeXTSTEP browser/editor (by TimBL) which predates both of them?

It has sockets, so... pretty much anything you can do with those, you can do with Emacs.

* Email (gnus)

* NNTP (gnus)

* IRC

Come to mind offhand.

Slightly off-topic, but is there still much NNTP use out there other than piracy related? I was a heavy NNTP user once upon a time, but all the public groups I once used seem to be overrun by spam and private ones seem to have gone in favor of email. I would expect there's a quite a few private servers out there to warrant continual updating in a program like emacs.

I prefer to consume mailing lists via Gmane's NNTP gateway: http://gmane.org/

It's a surprisingly nice experience. You can really easily pull archives, nntp clients tend to handle threading well, etc.

Relevant to this subthread, Gmane's maintainer is also the maintainer of Gnus, so the Gmane web UI is (I'm told) surprisingly familiar for Gnus users.

Sure: I use NNTP for my RSS/Atom feeds and my mailing lists, using the excellent gateways at http://gmane.org/ and http://gwene.org/

I use NNTP to follow a handful of development mailing lists via gmane.org.

Yes! There's a healthy community at comp.misc where we post stuff like this article, and sci.misc where we post non comp stuff. In fact you'll see a healthy correlation between articles posted to Ycombinator that are subsequently posted and discussed on comp.misc and now sci.misc. Good place to get a free Usenet account is Solani.org now that Albasani and AIOE are somewhat over-subscribed.

D development forums are NNTP, although there is a forum as well.

I really prefer the keyboard navigation and all the niceties offered by Thunderbird than the web groups interface, each with its own set of allowed actions, mostly without keyboard navigation.

And a mail client. It's pretty much an operating system.

Someone please try the emacs as init with this release.

I tried to compile emacs statically but under archlinux I need to build ncurses (and probably others) statically too. Which is too much of a black art to me. Gonna try on debian since I believe they include static binairies in packages.

Someone's already tried this.

http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux....

I know, this dates back from emacs 21.3. I wanted to know if someone had the time and skills to replicate the experiment with 24.4

It's very interesting. It seems a neat solution. Anyone go further? Really work on it?

> Highlights of this release include: A built-in web browser (M-x eww)

It's had w3 for quite a while. 'eww' is new.

It's still text-mode though (it will show images inline).

There was a project to integrate webkit into an emacs browser mode but not sure where that stands.

IIRC, w3 was an external program while eww is built entirely in elisp.

w3 is written in ELisp and runs in Emacs http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/w3

w3m is an external program, which Emacs has a wrapper for http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/w3m

My apologies then, since I did not remember correctly. Thank you for enlightening!

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