Support for the link feature

[joshbode]

I would love to be able to use the link feature and I have created a branch to add support to the configuration parser to expose this: https://github.com/joshbode/ghostty/tree/link-config

I wasn't sure how this was intended to be exposed, so I kept the configuration simple as the regex(es) to be matched, e.g.

# ~/.config/ghostty/config
link = ([~.]?/)?([\w.+-]+/)*([\w.+-]+)
link = \d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}

note: the patterns are checked in the order provided, when matching links

$ ghostty +show-config | grep "^link = "
link = ([~.]?/)?([\w.+-]+/)*([\w.+-]+)
link = \d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}

Do we want to be able to specify the target of the link patterns (i.e. map to something other than open/xdg-open)?
(I have an open wrapper sitting high in my PATH so I can redirect matches where I like, typically to a Neovim session)

Site note: I've been very impressed with Ghostty and it's been working well for me, the only thing that's really been keeping me on Alacritty is this feature, the equivalent there being hints.

[Grazfather]

#2394 is discussing some ways to expose this in the config.

I personally would want something other than open. copy/yank, open in browser, etc, are two big ones.

[joshbode]

I've updated my branch to support specifying a limited set of actions (currently open and copy_to_clipboard):
e.g.:

link = copy_to_clipboard=#ID\d+
link = open=([~.]?/)?([\w.+-]+/)*([\w.+-]+)
link = open=\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}

with:

• open: open with system opener (e.g. open/xdg-open) - if this matches a URL, then it'll (probably) open in the browser
• copy_to_clipboard - what is says on the tin :)

I've tried to keep the same config style as for keybind but I'm open to suggestions

[daisylb]

I'd also like something else other than just open/xdg-open. My main use case is being able to click on a file/line/column reference in a traceback and jump to the corresponding line in my editor, but there are probably others too.

Maybe a way to define an executable that gets called with the matched text as the argument, so you can write a script to do whatever you want with it? I think iTerm2 does something along those lines.

[00-kat]

In my opinion that is a little out of scope for this discussion; I personally would make a new discussion about this (cross-referencing the current one) instead.

Actually disregard this, I didn't notice originally that the OP had also mentioned this in their discussion.

[joshbode]

That makes sense - I've ended up putting a wrapper script for open higher up on my path (/usr/local/bin/open works), which I'm using even without these changes. The wrapper catches various URLs and redirects them to Neovim, and other specific tools before falling back to the system open. My wrapper supports line/columns numbers too. I'm happy to share (though it's grown pretty complex over the years ;)

Additionally, I've managed to configure a number of tools to actually output OSC 8 hyperlinks (e.g. file://), which Ghostty will support today (and will send to open), e.g.

alias ls='ls --hyperlink=auto'  # I'm using GNU tools on macOS
alias tree='tree --hyperlink'
alias rg='rg --hyperlink-format=file://{host}{path}:{line}:{column}'
alias fd='fd --hyperlink=auto'

(see https://github.com/Alhadis/OSC8-Adoption/ for more tools that support hyperlinks)