urxvt mouseless url yanking

In the quest for a completely mouse free desktop, I wanted to be able to yank URLs from the termial without using the mouse. This happens often enough in IRC when I would want to grab the most recent URL and run it in firefox.

I talked to the author of vimperator and he suggested that I look at urxvt (packaged as rxvt-unicode). So I did.

A few hours later and I have a perl plug-in for urxvt that does just want I wanted.

I use [wmii]{tags/wmii} and one of the keys that is unused atm, is Alt-U. I mapped the new feature to Alt-U, but it’s configurable.

Overview

• Alt-U - enter URL yank mode, select last URL; pressed subsequently selects previous URL
• <esc> - exit URL yank mode
• y - copy selected URL to clipboard
• <enter> - launch browser (see below) on selected URL
• ctrl-n - select next url
• ctrl-p - select previous url

NOTE: the key combinations are intended to be vim-like and permit me to extend them to be able to mark arbitrary text using similar shortcuts as screen copy mode. So HJKL are reserved for future use, hence the use of a control key.

The code

• gitweb interface for the urxvt script repo
• current version of mark-yank-urls

Clone my repo

• you will need git

  apt-get install git-core git clone git://git.jukie.net/urxvt

Install

• you will need urxvt

  apt-get install rxvt-unicode

• put mark-yank-urls in $HOME/.urxvt/

  If you got it from git, run make install

• in order to copy things into the clipboard the script needs one of two things

  • the clipboard perl module

     cpan Clipboard
    

  • the xclip utility

     apt-get install xclip
    

Configure

• put this in $HOME/.Xdefaults

  URxvt.keysym.M-u: perl:mark-yank-urls:activate_mark_mode URxvt.underlineURLs: true URxvt.perl-lib: /home/jukie/bart/.urxvt/ <— your path URxvt.perl-ext: selection,mark-yank-urls URxvt.urlLauncher: firefox

Run

• you can just run urxvt, but if you don’t have .Xdefaults working right, use this:

  urxvt –perl-lib ${HOME}/.urxvt/ -pe mark-yank-urls