No Znx!

Most terminals these days have the ability to click on a URL and then it opens in your browser. Needless to say some terminals aren’t as simple to setup as others. I commonly use URxvt and initially didn’t think that it was possible to do. However URxvt has a rather nice Perl plug-in which expands its range of abilities. So to setup, edit or create ~/.Xdefaults and add these lines to it:

urxvt*urlLauncher:  firefox
urxvt*matcher.button:  1
urxvt*perl-ext-common:  default,matcher,searchable-scrollback
urxvt.matcher.pattern.1:  \\bwww\\.[\\w-]\\.[\\w./?&@#-]*[\\w/-]

Now you need to make this work:

# xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

You may need to add this command to ~/.xinitrc or whatever startup script that your desktop uses. Most systems should automatically load it when your X starts.

Whilst I chose to use firefox as the browser you can set it to any other browser, indeed if you are using Gnome a trick to use the default browser is:

urxvt*urlLauncher:  gnome-open

This is actually rather handy because you can click on a variety of links not just web ones and it will open the correct tool for those links. Thanks to Nion’s blog I found out that you can colour the URLs too! Finally to those that wish to be mouseless, how about Bart’s blog for an awesome example of the abilities of URxvt!