Doubleclick links in terminal
For a very long while now, several years actually, I’ve been a bit annoyed by the behaviour of terminals under X when you doubleclick links.
What the UI considers a word is selected.
Selection ‘starts’ at the point that is doubleclicked and ‘spreads’ in each direction, stopping at a char it considers to be a word delimiter.
A space is probably always considered a delimiter.
Sometimes a ? too, and often , as well.
This has been very annoying for me.
I spend quite alot of time in irc.
Irssi in a screen.
Its lovely in combination with bitlbee.
Every now and then someone pastes an url which I want to doubleclick and then paste into my browser.
Now the selection stops prematurely as it’s not uncommon for a hyperlink to contain one of the characters that is in the word delimiter list.
I’ve thought of this as a limitation to the system I use and, although annoyed, never gave it much thought.
Maybe I’ve been to susceptible to propagandaists telling me gnu/linux is user-unfriendly.
A couple of weeks ago I started to think a little about it and the solution is rather simple.
I use Eterm more or less exclusively.
In ~/.Eterm/user.cfg I’ve put this:
<eterm-0.9>
begin misc
cut_chars "\t\\\`\\\"\'() *,;<>[]{|}"
end misc
This might not be perfect but it’s certainly served it’s purpose. I have been able to doubleclick on the links and then middleclick in the address field (or open a new tab) in the browser. My OS is even better =)