Re: terminfo capability for hyperlinks

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2025-01-03T04:15:24-0500, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> 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 haven't seen any of that except what you've quoted.  That was enough.

I linked the Derek Glidden piece deliberately.  Here's another.

10Xers, one and all.[1]

> I don't see that likely to change.

Me neither.  They have to explain to their managers Why Things Are Hard,
and saying that you constitute a one-man obstacle to progress is a lot
easier than getting a brogrammer to admit that their mad 10Xer skills
aren't up to a task.

> > 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.

That occurred to me, but it wouldn't be much help when running the
terminal in full-screen mode, which I've been known to do.

I'll have to try harder to be interesting.  ;-)

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://medium.com/@kyle.coberly/the-mythical-10x-programmer-e759a4ba2f0

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