Opening terminal links with the keyboard

Question

One of the very useful things about urxvt is that I could use keyboard shortcuts to navigate through and open hyperlinks that appeared on the terminal screen (by adding some urxvt* entries on .Xresources, IIRC).

Now I'm on xfce4-terminal and am missing this functionality. I took a look at ~/.config/xfce4/terminal/accels.scm but couldn't find anything relevant. For the moment, I'm stuck to having to grab my mouse and Ctrl+click the terminal URLs I want to open in the browser, which is quite disruptive to my workflow.

Question: is it possible to select and open URLs printed on the xfce4-terminal just using the keyboard?

I'd be glad to hear about other terminal emulators that offer this functionality, but I don't intend on going back to urxvt for the moment.

Answer 1

Expanding a bit on @ibuprofen's answer, here's a workaround that works as long as the URL doesn't span multiple lines:

1. Open Ctrl+Shift+F
2. Enable searching with regular expressions
3. Enter http\S+ as the search term
4. Press Enter until the desired URL is highlighted
5. Press Esc
6. Press Ctrl+Shift+C to copy the URL to the clipboard
7. Paste it on your browser with Ctrl+V (you might need to press something like Ctrl+L first to focus the address bar)

Answer 2

This should work for any terminal running Bash on Linux, BSD, or macOS. (video demo)

Note: It only opens the last link, but it could definitely be extended to select interactively.

# Add this somewhere in your .bashrc

# Record terminal to this file.
__terminal_recording_file="${HOME}/.cache/terminal_recording"

function __start_recording_terminal () {
  # if the file exists, don't record, as this means that the recording is
  # already happening in the current shell.
  if [[ -f "$__terminal_recording_file" ]]; then
    return
  fi

  # save the PID of the shell that started the recording
  echo $$ >| "$__terminal_recording_file.pid"

  # Start recording, with "flushing" option to have quick access to the last
  # output, and quiet option to disable "started recording" message.
  # Also, check if script can be run with '-f' (linux) or '-F' (macOS)
  script -q -f /dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1
  local script_can_be_run_with_f="$?"
  if [[ "$script_can_be_run_with_f" -ne 0 ]]; then
    script -q -F "$__terminal_recording_file"
  else
    script -q -f "$__terminal_recording_file"
  fi
}
start_recording_terminal # comment this line to disable recording

function __open_last_visible_link_in_terminal () {
  # look for the last thing that looks like a link in the last 50 lines of the
  # terminal recording (assumed to be the currently visible part of the
  # terminal)
  local link="$( tail -n 50 "$__terminal_recording_file" | tac | grep -Eo -m 1 --color=never 'https?://[[:print:]]+')"
  if [[ -z "$link" ]]; then
    echo "No link found"
    return 1
  fi

  echo "Opening link: $link"
  open "$link"
}

# Bind Ctrl-K to "__open_last_visible_link_in_terminal" in all modes
# Also, it runs Ctrl-u first, so that the command line is cleared and it
# doesn't interfere.
bind -m emacs     '"\C-k":"\C-u __open_last_visible_link_in_terminal\n"'
bind -m vi-insert '"\C-k":"\C-u __open_last_visible_link_in_terminal\n"'
bind -m vi        '"\C-k":"\C-u __open_last_visible_link_in_terminal\n"'

# cleanup function on Bash exit
function __cleanup () {
  # if a recording is happening and the parent of this shell is the recording
  # command, kill the shell that started the recording and remove the files
  ps -p $PPID | grep -q 'script -q'
  is_parent_script="$?"
  if [[ -f "$__terminal_recording_file" && "$is_parent_script" -eq 0 ]]; then
    rm "$__terminal_recording_file"

    # kill the shell that started the recording
    local pid="$(cat "$__terminal_recording_file.pid")"
    rm "$__terminal_recording_file.pid"
    kill -9 "$pid"
  fi
}
trap __cleanup EXIT

Btw Alacritty has that as a built-in feature: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Alacritty#Regex_hints

It can also be done in tmux with the tmux-urlview plugin.