Re: terminfo capability for hyperlinks

[Thomas Dickey]

On Thu, Jan 02, 2025 at 11:15:13PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2025-01-03T00:54:45+0100, Bruno Haible via Bug reports for ncurses, the 
> GNU implementation of curses wrote:
> > For about 7 years, this writeup explains how to use hyperlinks in
> > terminal emulators:
> >   https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda
> > 
> > 6 years ago, I wrote a library (GNU libtextstyle [1]) that makes use
> > of this feature on terminal emulators that support it. The problem is
> > determining the "support it": I did not find a terminfo capability
> > for it, at the time. Nor do I do now. So there still is this ugly code [2]
> > that looks at the value of $TERM, instead of using terminfo.
> > 
> > I also see that some programs introduce extra command-line options in order
> > to tell them about the hyperlink capability.
> > 
> > Would it not make sense to introduce a terminfo capability for this?
> 
> It wasn't hard to predict the direction this thread would take; Thomas
> has publicly pinched the bridge of his nose at libvte/gnome-terminal's
> developers (many of whom are anonymous) many times over the years.  And

...and the not-so-anonymous vte developers aren't shy about making disparaging
remarks about me, in addition to specific comments about ncurses and xterm.

I don't see that likely to change.

(I already knew about the IMO, by the way, but Bruno should have done a little
more research before using that).

> xterm could decorate the character cells associated with an OSC 8
> hyperlink.  How it decorates them, I have no opinion.  When
> shift+middle-clicking the mouse over such a character cell, a normally
> grayed-out entry in the "VT Options" pop-up menu, labeled "Select URL to
> Clipboard" or similar, would be enabled.  If that entry were chosen,
> that's what would happen.

Actually, the only interesting proposal that I've seen is the way mintty
does it: display the text in the titlebar.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
https://invisible-island.net

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