Using terminal escape-sequences within GNU screen

Question

I have a ruby terminal script that I would like to print out hyperlinks. I achieve that like so:

puts("\e]8;;https://example.com\aThis is a link\e]8;;\a")

This works perfectly fine in a "normal" terminal (gnome-terminal btw) window.

But I need to run this script within GNU screen, where the escape-sequence simply has no effect. Other sequences (like colors for example) work fine, the hyperlink one (which according to the source might be a gnome-terminal-only thing) doesn't. (screen is running inside gnome-terminal)

How can I get screen to acknowledge my link sequence and display it properly?

Answer 1

You can pass through some text to the terminal screen itself runs in by putting it inside an ESC P, ESC \ pair (\033P%s\033\\ in printf format).

So you should bracket inside \eP..\e\\ pairs all the parts of the sequence, except for the text which will appear on the screen ("This is a link"):

printf '\eP\e]8;;https://example.com\a\e\\This is a link\eP\e]8;;\a\e\\\n'
printf '\eP\e]8;;%s\a\e\\%s\eP\e]8;;\a\e\\\n' https://example.com 'This is a link'

Or, from C:

puts("\eP\e]8;;https://example.com\a\e\\This is a link\eP\e]8;;\a\e\\");
printf("\eP\e]8;;%s\a\e\\%s\eP\e]8;;\a\e\\\n", url, title);

Putting the replacement text too inside \eP..\e\\ may result in screen losing track of the cursor position.

---

This is documented in the GNU screen manual:

ESC P  (A)     Device Control String
               Outputs a string directly to the host
               terminal without interpretation

The "string" should should be terminated with a ST ("string terminator") escape, ie. \e\\ -- thence \eP..\e\\.