Hi, Recently two popular terminal emulators, GNOME Terminal and iTerm2 have implemented a brand new feature: explicit hyperlinks.
Unlike the existing functionality of most terminal emulators of automatically detecting URLs that appear on the screen, this time it's like hyperlinks on web pages: the link target is specified by the OSC 8 escape sequence and the visible text can be an arbitrary piece of text. As I've played with this feature, I found a really compelling use case: listing files in a way that all of them are hyperlinks to "file://...". It makes it as easy and convenient as a Ctrl+click to open them in their preferred graphical application. (For even more fun, there's a pending demo patch to GNOME Terminal to display a preview of certain local files on mouseover. We're uncertain yet if we'll finalize and ship it or not.) I've created a quick proof of concept patch for a new cmdline option "ls --hyperlink=always/auto/never", have set it up in my "ls" alias, and been using that happily for a few weeks now. Please find it at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779734#c126. Note that it contains a couple of issues, e.g. I forgot to free some data, and it does stupid things around symlinks. As said, it's a demo, not a fully polished patch. I'd be curious to hear if you like this idea, and would be happy to see this option appearing in mainstream coreutils. Please see https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda for details about the feature. Let me know if you have any questions, concerns etc. (cc me, I'm not subscribed). Thanks a lot, egmont
