Using Emacs 81 Elfeed Webkit

Before I get to my elisp series, I thought I'd do a short video on elfeed-webkit. This was suggested to me by jcs. Even though I think elfed-webkit is great - a mini-gamechanger for me, I thought that there wasn't enough for a video. Then I realized that in order to run elfeed-webkit you need to have xwidgets enabled in your Emacs build. I thought I'd make a video on how I build Emacs and enable features like xwidgets and then I quickly set up elfeed-webkit.

If you use Emacs and reed rss/atom feeds, you really should check out elfeed and if you use elfeed, then elfeed-webkit. It basically allows elfeed to render feeds as the appear in a browser right from within Emacs.

Here's the writeup with the video at the bottom.

Building Emacs

I run Linuxmint which is an Ubuntu Linux derivative. To build Emacs here, you have to first set up your machine with all the right developer tools.

First, you have to go to your software manager and enable software sources - I show how to do that in the video.

Then you have to install the build tools. I typed the follownig commands.

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install build-essential
  sudo apt build-dep emacs

The first line updates your package repo lists to reflect that you turned on the source code repos and the next two install what you need.

Next, you have to grab the Emacs source code. I show you how in the video using git. Grab it from https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=emacs. You can also download the files old school from the same site.

In the video, I walk through the compile but the basics are:

  sh autogen.sh
  ./configure --without-compress-install --with-native-compilation --with-json --with-mailutils --with-tree-sitter --with-xwidgets CC=gcc-10
  make
  sudo make install

If the ./configure line gives errors you might need some extra libraries - I talk about that in the videos.

Also note that the ./configure line I used above includes extra options that I use for tree-sitter - not needed for elfeed-webkit but It's another rabbit hole I went down as a result of reading Mickey Peterson's article on it.

Once we've got Emacs with the required features we can move to elfeed webkit.

Elfeed and Elfeed Webkit

I already wrote a series of posts with videos on elfeed. If you've never used it, check it out - here are links to the older posts.

The video shows how I set it up and also its use. Basically I just copied the config right over from the elfeed-webkit repo but here it is for convenience:

  (straight-use-package 'elfeed-webkit) ;; use straight to install


  ;; and old-school use-package to configure
  (use-package elfeed-webkit
        :straight
        :demand ;; !
        :init
        (setq elfeed-webkit-auto-tags '(webkit comics))
        :config
        (elfeed-webkit-auto-enable-by-tag)
        :bind (:map elfeed-show-mode-map
                    ("t" . elfeed-webkit-toggle)))

So, all of this is in the video. Enjoy:

2023-06-26

emacs

#emacs