For some time now, gnome-terminal amongst others has had a heuristic
that guesses at URLs, and allows you to control-click to directly open
it. However, this was easily foxed by applications doing line-wrapping
instead of letting the terminal do so.
A few years ago, gnome-terminal gained ANSI escape sequences for URL
highlighting.
It requires applications to output the necessary escape codes, but works
far more reliably.
Annoyingly, you still need to control-click, but that is easily fixed. I rebuilt Ubuntu’s build with this change like so:
sudo apt build-dep gnome-terminal
apt source gnome-terminal
cd gnome-terminal-3.28.2
dpkg-buildpackage --no-sign -b
sudo dpkg -i ../gnome-terminal_3.28.2-1ubuntu1~18.04.1_amd64.deb
This would be most useful if mutt supported the sequences, but
unfortunately its built-in pager is stuck behind libncurses and can’t
easily get out from under it. Using an external pager with mutt is not
great either, as you lose all the integration.
There’s also no support in
w3m. Even though it
thankfully avoids libncurses, it’s a bit of a pain to implement, as
instead of just needing to track individual bits for bold on/off or
whatever, there’s a whole URL target that needs mapping onto the
(re)drawn screen lines.
So instead there’s the somewhat ersatz:
$ grep email-html ~/.muttrc
macro pager,index,attach k "<pipe-message>email-html<Enter>"
where
$ cat email-html
#!/bin/bash
dir=$(mktemp -d -p /tmp)
ripmime -i - -d $dir --name-by-type
cat $dir/text-html* | w3m -no-mouse -o display_link \
-o display_link_number -T text/html | \
sed 's!https*://.*!\x1B]8;;&\x1B\\&\x1B]8;;\x1B\\!g' | less -rX
rm -rf $dir
It’ll have to do.