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Appine means "App in Emacs", which is an Emacs plugin using a Dynamic Module that allows you to embed native macOS views (WebKit, PDFKit, Quick look PreviewView, etc.) directly inside Emacs windows.

You can open a browser, read PDFs, listen to music, and watch videos in Emacs. Enjoy the full power of native macOS rendering, smooth scrolling, and hardware acceleration without leaving Emacs!

• Use It Like an Emacs Buffer: When Appine starts, it opens an embedded Appine Window tied to an *Appine Window* buffer. You can maximize it with C-x 1, close it with C-x 0, and switch between buffers with C-x o. If you close it, you can reopen it with C-x b by switching to the Appine Window buffer. You can also scroll through the embedded Appine Window using C-n, C-p, C-v, M-v, M-<, and M->, just as you would in an Emacs buffer.
• Native Web Browsing: Embed a fully functional Safari-like WebKit view inside an Emacs window, with full support for cookies.
• Native PDF Rendering: View PDFs with macOS's built-in PDFKit for buttery-smooth scrolling and zooming, and easily copy content from it to other Emacs buffers.
• Native Word/Excel Rendering: View Word/Excel files with macOS's built-in Quartz for buttery-smooth scrolling and zooming. Unfortunately, you cannot edit them yet.
• Seamless Integration: The native views automatically resize and move when you split or adjust Emacs windows.
• Tab Management: Support for multiple embedded tabs, switching, and closing directly from Emacs.
• Org-mode Integration: Use Appine to open links and files within Org files.
• Plugin Support: You can now write some simple plugins for Appine's browser.

Run M-x appine to open the Appine Window. If you open it for the first time, the Appine Window will show a brief usage.

You can close it with M-x appine-close or simply C-x 0. If you want to open the Appine window again, run M-x appine or just open the *Appine Window* buffer.

You can kill the Appine window completely with M-x appine-kill.

The embedded App has two states: Active and Inactive.

• Active State: When the *Appine Window* buffer is active, it can be used just like a native Mac App.
• Inactive State: When the *Appine Window* buffer is not active, the embedded App is locked, grayed out, and cannot be interacted with. You can use Emacs normally at this time.

A video demonstrating the two states.

Run M-x appine-open-url. You will be prompted to enter a URL. A native WebKit view will open in the current Emacs window. A demonstration video is as follows:

A video demonstrating Open Web Page.

To quickly open links on web pages, I wrote a simple link-hints plugin for Appine's built-in browser. It works similarly to Vimium — pressing f will highlight the links on the page, and then pressing the corresponding key will quickly open the link on the current page, or pressing q to quit the link hints, as shown below:

Run M-x appine-open-file. If you select a PDF file, it will be rendered using macOS PDFKit. Other files will be previewed using Quick Look.

When you forced on the Appine window, you can typing C-x C-f to open file in the macOS file chooser.

A video demonstrating Open PDF.

Setting (setq appine-use-for-org-links t) enables opening URLs and files with Appine. You can toggle this feature on or off by running M-x appine-toggle-open-in-org-mode.

TODO: Add a video demonstrating Org-mode integration.

The Toolbar implements common App operations such as New Tab, Open File, etc., and also includes editing operations like Cut/Copy/Paste. Since Appine introduces the macOS Quick Look Preview module, most common files can be previewed. You can open files through the Open File button in the Appine window.

Copy/Paste video

The native view is tied to an Emacs buffer (named *Appine-Window*). You can split windows (C-x 3, C-x 2), resize them, or switch buffers. The native view will automatically track the Emacs window's geometry.

• macOS (Tested on macOS 12+)
• Emacs 29.1 or higher compiled with Dynamic Module support (--with-modules). You can use M-: (functionp 'module-load) to check if the module-load function is available. (Note: Most popular distributions like Emacs Plus, Emacs Mac Port, and emacsformacosx have this enabled by default).

The easiest way to install Appine is using use-package with straight.el or quelpa. The package will automatically download the pre-compiled native binary (.dylib) for your Mac (supports both Apple Silicon and Intel) on the first run.

(use-package appine
  :straight (appine :type git :host github :repo "chaoswork/appine")
  :defer t  
  :custom
  ;; enables opening URLs and files with Appine, default is nil
  (appine-use-for-org-links t)
  ;; bind any prefix you like
  :bind (("C-x a a" . appine)
         ("C-x a u" . appine-open-url)
         ("C-x a o" . appine-open-file)))

If you prefer to build the module yourself, you need the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install).

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/chaoswork/appine.git ~/.emacs.d/lisp/appine

2. Compile the C/Objective-C module:

   cd ~/.emacs.d/lisp/appine
   make

3. Add to your init.el:

   (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/appine")
   (require 'appine)
   (setq appine-use-for-org-links t)
   (global-set-key (kbd "C-x a a") 'appine)
   (global-set-key (kbd "C-x a u") 'appine-open-url)
   (global-set-key (kbd "C-x a o") 'appine-open-file))

Appine uses Emacs Dynamic Modules to bridge C/Objective-C and Emacs Lisp.

The project is still under continuous improvement. If you encounter any problems, feel free to open an issue.

Support for Windows and Linux systems will be considered in the future. The main reason is that I currently don't have a Windows computer, and the Linux distribution I use doesn't have a GUI, which makes it impossible for me to debug the plugin at present. Moreover, unlike macOS, Windows and Linux lack native system-level rendering frameworks for web pages, PDFs, and Office files, requiring third-party libraries to implement, which often introduces instability. Cross-platform libraries like Qt are often too massive and too heavy for a small Emacs plugin. If you use Linux or Windows and really want to use browsers, PDFs, and other apps in Emacs, you can try the EAF project.

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPLv3) - see the LICENSE file for details.