3.9 Support for web page editing and hacking

For those who usually use Emacs to write documentation or programs, it's very convenient to be able to browse the web in the same Emacs session. For example, if you are editing a HTML file in Emacs, you can preview it without launching an external browser. You can also quickly copy sample code from technical documentation during a programming marathon...

How about the opposite? (That is, being able to edit the source of a web page in a web browser.) Wouldn't that be cool? Imagine you found an error in your document after previewing it in emacs-w3m; you probably want to fix it right away. Or if you are a programmer specialized in web technology, sometimes you might want to see the raw HTML file for the current web page... especially if you are the author of a Shimbun module (see section 9.5 How to make a new shimbun module).

It is usually possible to switch to an Emacs buffer visiting an HTML file by using the buffer name, but emacs-w3m adds a specific keybinding for this. Emacs-w3m knows the URL of the web page it is visiting, so why not take advantage of this?

\

Display the current web page in the raw HTML format(w3m-view-source).

=

Show the information about currently displayed web page. It includes title, URL, document type, last modified date(w3m-view-header).

E

Edit the local file pointed by URL of current page(w3m-edit-current-url).

e

Edit the local file pointed by URL under point(w3m-edit-this-url).

M

Launch an external browser (other than emacs-w3m) and display the same web page as currently displayed in emacs-w3m(w3m-view-url-with-external-browser). The external browser to be used is defined by the variable w3m-content-type-alist, depending on the kind of URL.

The (see section 10. Some knick-knacks using emacs-w3m) section gives more examples on how to integrate emacs-w3m with other commands and Emacs subsystems.