3.3 Going back through time and space

Emacs-w3m has several ways to present you with a list of all the pages you visited before. The first way is simply called the "emacs-w3m history", it is a list of the pages you visited in this session, presented hierarchically, that is: when you follow a link, the page you're leaving becomes the "parent" of the page you're going to. It is a very nice to keep track of the pages you visited, and remember from where you came if the history gets too long.

Here is an example of this feature in action, after a short visit to the GNU Project's homepage:

GNU's Not Unix! - the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Philosophy of the GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) GNU Emacs - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) Order from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Links to Other Free Software Sites - GNU Project - Free Software Fo... EFF: Homepage

(In fact, this example is slightly edited to fit in 72 columns; the URLs won't be cut in the actual emacs-w3m buffer.)

You can get this kind of history using the s key in any emacs-w3m buffer.

Please note that this history is buffer-local, i.e. specific to an emacs-w3m buffer. But emacs-w3m has a unique feature: when you visit a new page, the history is copied over to the new buffer, so that you can still access the pages you visited so far. This is different from the way Mozilla and others work; in these browsers the history always starts from scratch in new buffers.

Emacs-w3m can do more than just record which pages you visited, it can also save specific locations in those pages, in case you want to go back to the exact same place in the page. Press C-c C-@, and the location of the cursor will be stored in history. In order to go back to that particular location within the page, press C-c C-v in the emacs-w3m buffer visiting the page.

s

Display the list of visited URLs in this session.

C-c C-@

Record the position of the cursor in the page in history.

C-c C-v

Move to the position which has been marked with C-c C-@ (w3m-history-store-position) in the currently displayed page.

The other way to have information about past pages is the "arrived URLs" list: it is a list of the last 500 URLs you have visited in emacs-w3m. The list is ordered by date, the most recent coming first, and for each page the time of visit is displayed. Here's an example (edited):

Order from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) 22:53:25 GNU Emacs - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FS 22:53:05 Philosophy of the GNU Project - Free Software Foundati... 22:52:46 Philosophy of the GNU Project - Free Software Foundati... 22:52:39 EFF: Homepage 22:52:18 Links to Other Free Software Sites - GNU Project - Fre... 22:52:07 Links to Other Free Software Sites - GNU Project - Fre... 22:52:07 GNU's Not Unix! - the GNU Project and the Free Softwar... 22:51:32 Bookmarks 22:51:02 The DICT Development Group- upwards 2003-01-08 the monkey puzzle: new debian packages as an rss feed 2003-01-08 new-debian-packages.rss 2003-01-07 it's a miracle 2003-01-06

You can get this history by passing a prefix argument to the previous command, i.e. using C-u s. The number of URLs showed in this page is customizable, see the w3m-keep-arrived-urls variable. It cannot exceed 500 by default. See section 5. Customizable variables.

Of course, in all cases all the lines showed in the examples are links, you can go to any of the pages you visited previously just like if you were visiting a regular page, by following the link.

s

C-u s

Display the list of URLs visited in this session. If called with a prefix argument, show the list of arrived URLs instead (w3m-history).

Also see the 3.1.3 Moving from page to page section, it explains how to move in the history with simple keybindings, i.e. the "Back" and "Next" features.