2.6 Minimal settings to run emacs-w3m

This section mentions some fundamental settings for emacs-w3m. If you want to fine-tune your installation, you'll find many customizable variables in 5. Customizable variables.

`Autoloads'

You don't need this if you've installed emacs-w3m as an XEmacs package (see section 2.4 Installing emacs-w3m) because the `w3m/auto-autoloads.el' takes care of setting up autoloads.

In all other cases, put the following line in your `~/.emacs' file:

(require 'w3m-load)

`Startup File'

We recommend using the `~/.emacs-w3m' file (which is the default value of w3m-init-file) if you need to twiddle some emacs-w3m variables. This file is similar to `~/.emacs', but is read when emacs-w3m starts. Note that some options shouldn't be modified there, for example, w3m-command.

`Proxy Gateway'

If you are behind a firewall and access the Internet through a proxy gateway, you need to instruct w3m to use it.

There are several ways to do this, one is to set the http_proxy environment variable globally in the shell something like:

setenv http_proxy http://proxy.hogege.com:8000/

Another way is to customize the w3m-command-arguments variable to add the options `-o' and `http_proxy=http://PROXY_SERVER_NAME:PORT/'.

This can also be done in your `~/.emacs-w3m' file as shown below:

(setq w3m-command-arguments (nconc w3m-command-arguments '("-o" "http_proxy=http://proxy.hogege.com:8000/")))

To specify hosts for which the proxy shouldn't be used (Intranet sites and the like), set the no_proxy (note that it is not no-proxy) environment variable to a comma-separated list of hostnames. Alternatively, you can set the w3m-no-proxy-domains variable to a list of domain names (not host names) as follows:

(setq w3m-no-proxy-domains '("local.com" "neighbor.com"))

See also the documentation of the w3m-command-arguments-alist variable for instructions on how to use regexps to specify no_proxy hosts.