Re: eww

[Karl Fogel]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> writes:
>Currently eww uses a single buffer, and whenever you ask it to display a
>new URL, it discards everything in the buffer.  This means that when you
>want to return to the previous page, eww has to re-fetch and re-render
>the page.  And you lose the data in <form>s you have filled out.
>
>Would it make more sense for eww to use new buffers every time?  eww
>would have a backlog of, say, ten buffers, and going back to the
>previous page would just mean popping to the previous buffer.  And it
>could use `bury-buffer' and rename the previous buffer to a name with
>something leading with " " when you go to a new page.
>
>Opinions?

I second the questions Eli asked, but FWIW:

No reason to limit the number of buffers here.  It makes sense to always
keep them except when the user explicitly kills one (or sets some var
indicating that eww should kill buffers).  Each buffer has a "reload"
keybinding, right?  And when a user goes to a URL that eww already has a
buffer for, it can reuse that buffer and do the reload.

The edge case question is: if you have filled-out form data in a buffer,
and then eww does a reload, should it toss your data?  In that case, I
think it makes sense to rename the original buffer -- the one with the
filled-out form data -- to "buffer<N>" where N increases, and reload
into "buffer".  In other words, if someone panics and realizes they
shouldn't have thrown away the novel they wrote in that gigantic text
form, at least there is a way to recover it (from the "<N>" buffer).

Very excited about eww!

-K