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I have been using w3m for a couple of weeks and am convinced that it is my preferred text browser - with one exception.

Is there any way to yank URLs to the clipboard without using the mouse?

I have looked through the manual and, using the default keybindings, there doesn't appear to be any documented way to do this.

Has anyone developed a script to work around this?

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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Set the “External Browser” option to

sh -c 'printf %s "$0" | xsel'

You can use xsel -b to use the clipboard instead of the primary selection. An alternative to xsel is xclip (xclip for the primary selection, xclip -selection CLIPBOARD for the clipboard).

In ~/.w3m/config, that's the extbrowser setting.

Then press M to copy (yank) the URL of the current page, or ESC M to copy the URL of the link under the cursor.

You can use the second or third external browser for that instead; then the key combination is 2 M or 3 M or 2 ESC M or 3 ESC M.

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  • I don't know if you cooked that up on the spot or it is a (little) known workaround, but it is both elegant & effective. Thank you.
    – jasonwryan
    Commented May 3, 2011 at 23:33
  • I did. I hadn't realized this was so easy before your question spurred me into looking! Thank you.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented May 3, 2011 at 23:43
  • Colour me impressed :) To put the finishing touches on, I mapped some more intuitive keybinds, (the functions are EXTERN & EXTERN_LINK) and now I am set...
    – jasonwryan
    Commented May 4, 2011 at 0:25
  • I think this won't work for magnet links, I am getting some Invalid directive errors.
    – Vignesh
    Commented Oct 28, 2018 at 19:13
  • Defining extbrowser ahead of time isn't required. If you run 2 ESC M or 3 ESC M when it isn't defined, it will prompt you for a command to run, which means you can run any program on the link. You could leave extbrowser 3 always open so as to have a command runner.
    – norcalli
    Commented Apr 4, 2019 at 10:26
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Have you tried muennich/urxvt-perls? Awesome scripts that can let you select/open URLs, select/copy with keyboard, and handle copy/paste from clipboard. Awesome scripts!

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  • Yes, I have been using Bert's perls for a few years now. They don't work in w3m, however.
    – jasonwryan
    Commented May 20, 2014 at 18:09
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If I understand correctly, you need a terminal emulator with a keyboard shortcut to paste test. For example, in Konsole you can do it with Ctrl-Shift-V.

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you can yank url vim style, supports tmux,linux,macos,windows,android

$EDITOR ~/.w3m/keymap

# yank url to multiple clipboard (under cursor)
keymap  yy      EXTERN_LINK "url=%s ; printf "%b" "$url" > /tmp/clipbrd.txt ; printf "%b" "$url" | xsel -b 2>/dev/null ; printf "%b" "$url" | tmux load-buffer - ; printf '%s' "$url" | wl-copy 2>/dev/null  ; printf '%s' "$url" | clip 2>/dev/null ; printf '%s' "$url" > /dev/clipboard 2>/dev/null ; printf '%s' "$url" | pbcopy 2>/dev/null ; printf '%s' "$url" | termux-clipboard-set 2>/dev/null"

# yank url to multiple clipboard (current page)
keymap  YY      EXTERN "url=%s ; printf "%b" "$url" > /tmp/clipbrd.txt ; printf "%b" "$url" | xsel -b 2>/dev/null ; printf "%b" "$url" | tmux load-buffer - ; printf '%s' "$url" | wl-copy 2>/dev/null  ; printf '%s' "$url" | clip 2>/dev/null ; printf '%s' "$url" > /dev/clipboard 2>/dev/null ; printf '%s' "$url" | pbcopy 2>/dev/null ; printf '%s' "$url" | termux-clipboard-set 2>/dev/null"

usage: go to a link and press yy to copy url

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