EWW buffers can now be auto-renamed in Emacs 29

2021-10-15

Starting with commit 171de3eee4 to the Emacs master branch, users can now opt-in to a feature that automatically renames EWW buffers to something more usable than the default *eww*.

The point of entry is the customisation option eww-auto-rename-buffer. When given a title value, it will use the web page’s title as the name of the buffer. When the value is url, the page’s URL shall be used instead. Otherwise it is possible to give it the symbol of a function that runs without parameters and returns a string. So users can configure this however they like.

Detail of the commit:

  commit 171de3eee459ed64388a8ced7d07fa031ea025a6
  Author: Protesilaos Stavrou <info@protesilaos.com>
  Date:   Fri Oct 15 14:12:32 2021 +0200

      Add new option to rename eww buffers

      * etc/NEWS: Document the new user options.

      * lisp/net/eww.el (eww-auto-rename-buffer, eww-buffer-name-length):
      Add new user options.
      (eww--rename-buffer): Introduce new function that performs the
      renaming of buffers.
      (eww--after-page-change): Add new wrapper function which calls
      'eww-update-header-line-format' and 'eww--rename-buffer'.
      (eww, eww-render, eww-tag-title, eww-readable, eww-restore-history):
      Include eww--after-page-change.

      Fix bug#51176.

      Co-authored-by: Abhiseck Paira <abhiseckpaira@disroot.org>
      Co-authored-by: Protesilaos Stavrou <info@protesilaos.com>

   doc/misc/eww.texi |  8 +++++++
   etc/NEWS          | 10 +++++++++
   lisp/net/eww.el   | 65 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-----
   3 files changed, 78 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

Thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion around bug#51176. Thanks to the Emacs co-maintainer, Lars Ingebrigtsen, for the feedback and for merging the patch. And special thanks to Abhiseck Paira, my co-author for this patch, for all the work in making this happen.

I am very happy to see this merged into core. I have been using a variant of it for several months now. It had been one of the most useful additions of mine in making EWW my main web browser.

[ Watch: EWW and my extras (text-based Emacs web browser) (2021-03-25) ]

Going forward, the plan is to extract more out of my prot-eww.el, refine it, and push it to emacs.git. Same principle for everything else that goes into my dotemacs.