Re: An Emacs plug-in for a browser (Firefox?)

[Antoine Levitt]

2008/9/6 Richard M. Stallman <address@hidden>

To make Emacs display web pages with their correct appearance is a
gigantic job.  I don't think that linking Emacs with a web browser
display engine is a feasible method.

Why not ?  See this thread : http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-05/msg00456.html
He already embeds emacs within emacs. Embedding firefox (or chrome, or midori, or whatever) shouldn't be much harder. A keymap would be transfered to the underlying process (kinda like what term-mode does), so the user can scroll the window and thinkgs like that. That alone would be  extremely useful. Then, we can use inter-process communication (maybe mozrepl can do that ?) to better communicate with the browser (and really integrate it into emacs, ie have the minibuffer prompt the user for the webpage to go to, and maybe add link following, kind of like how conkeror does). What I think would be really hard to do is have emacs edit text areas in place, but that's only icing on the cake.

I proposed years ago that we extend Emacs to the point where it can
function as a word processor.  This is mainly a matter of adding
features that let you put things in a buffer (and save them in files)
to get various kinds of formatting effects.  To display web pages is an
even more distant goal; it requires MORE new buffer and display
features.

I would be very glad to see people start working on some of them.

That's if we want to make emacs itself display the web page. I don't see the point, since other projects do precisely that.