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Comment by viksit | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or is that browser (after looking at the screenshot) really "eww"?

Well it is limited by Emacs' display engine. It is obviously not supposed to replace your default browser. But it is usually good enough to view html documentation. Which is really something you want inside your editor.

I don't really see this, but perhaps it's because I've been spoiled by the light of tiling windows managers

I haven't used eww but I use emacs-w3m from time to time and even though I use a tiling WM as well it's convenient to have regular editor commands work in the html buffer to copy/paste code snippets. Also stuff like hippie-expand will be able to complete symbols present in the html buffer which is pretty nice.

Actually - it would be cool if there was something that allowed you to render markdown atleast.

Also, is this display limitation a function of the OS? In which case, shouldn't Cocoa/GTK or other versions not have this issue and be able to actually embed nicer rendering in there with nice fonts?

It isn't a limitation of the OS, or of Emacs really. There is a build where you can embed GTK widgets inside of Emacs. It just isn't at all standard or, last I checked, well supported (on the level that the usual Emacs distribution is).

This web browser in Emacs is usable inside a terminal, and it displays HTML really nice. Much better than something like elink. Other GUI web browser is not.

> But it is usually good enough to view html documentation. Which is really something you want inside your editor.

Is it? I'd much rather have proper HTML rendering in another window than a kludge "in my editor".

Emacs (and eww) can look much better than that.

On my Mac for example, the text in Emacs is just as good looking (and in fact is indistinguishable from) the text in a native Apple application like TextEdit or Terminal.app.

Either the resolution of this screenshot has been scaled down in a way that makes diagonal lines jagged, or this particular Emacs has been configured not to use anti-aliasing of text.

Some Linux users prefer or at least are used to it that way.

On X, anti-aliasing (in the form of XFT) did not become available in an Emacs release till the relatively late date of Jul 2009. (It became available in pre-release versions of Emacs about 15 months before then.)

Okay for technical docs, an occasional Wikipedia article, etc. It's not a replacement for Firefox or Chrome.

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