[emacs-w3m:13715] Re: Problems installing emacs-w3m

On 2020-11-27 09:31, [email protected] wrote:
> I must confess I am confused by what is happening here.
> ...

Abundantly clear!

Here's what's going on: You have three separate entities operating
together.

The first is an ancient and remarkable 'text-page browser' called w3m
that can parse html and perform http interactions. It has nothing to do
with emacs, so it should come as no surprise that it has it would have
its own configuration file(s). In fact, it has a dedicated directory
full of all kinds of cool configuration features (that you may find
confusing or intimidating) all located under ~/.w3m/. You can find
documentation about the files at the end of the w3m man page. Let's call
this "NUMBER ONE"

The second entity, also ancient, also remarkable, is emacs itself.
Refer to the Emacs documentation for all its confusing options for
defining configuration files, but the ;tldr for most people is to use
either file ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.el or ~/.emacs.d/init.el. Let's call
this "NUMBER TWO".

These first two entities have nothing to do with one another.

The third entity is the emacs-w3m project, not quite as ancient as the
first two, but quite remarkable nonetheless, which is an emacs package
that uses w3m as a back-end processor (Many years later, emacs itself
would decide to create its own web browser called eww, which performs
all the work within emacs itself. Last I checked, eww still has a lot of
catching up to do to match the emacs-w3m feature set and compute
efficiency, but that's a bit off-topic). The point that's important to
allay your confusion is that this third entity, emac-w3m, also looks for
its own (optional) configuration file (Technically, if you know the
details of how emacs loads packages, you could put all your personal
configuration data for emacs-w3m in your emacs configuration file). The
default value for the emacs-w3m configuration file is ~/.emacs-w3m, but
the default value can be changed by setting a variable in your emacs
("NUMBER TWO") configuration file. That variable is called
w3m-init-file.

So, in summary:

1) w3m usually uses files in directory ~/.w3m/

2) emacs usually uses ~/emacs... (or ~/.emacs.d/init.el)

3) emacs-w3m usually uses ~/.emacs-w3m

Since emacs ("NUMBER TWO") is loaded first, if it sets variable
w3m-init-file, it can change what configuration file emacs-w3m ("NUMBER
THREE") will use by changing variable w3m-init-file.

In case you ask yourself, "Self, why aren't these files somewhere under
~/.config like all the "normal" programs?", the answer is "old age". All
three entities pre-dated the XFreedesktop standard. When the three were
developed, it was accepted practice to clutter users' home directories
with "invisible" configuration files (and also to clutter users' lungs
with "invisible" cigarette and leaded gasoline fumes).

If what you want is to keep your emacs life simple, use the default
values, ie. don't set variable w3m-init-file. At whatever point you
start wanting to manually customize your emacs-w3m experience, place
those customizations in file ~/.emacs-w3m ("NUMBER THREE"), not in your
emacs ("NUMBER TWO") configuration file.

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