Discussion

egmontkob/Hyperlinks_in_Terminal_Emulators.md

tombert: On my second day when I worked at Reddit, I learned by accident that I do not want my terminal to have clickable links.I was working on image compression, and we had a script where we would render a column with the original image link, and a column with the new compressed image, and a column with the relative percentage of size to PNG, and there would be like 200 rows at a time.I managed to somehow accidentally click on a link in iTerm, my browser opened, and I discovered what "sounding" [1] is, on a company computer, in the company office.I saw it, whispered "oh fuck!", and quickly killed my browser. I don't think anyone saw me but I was extremely worried that I was going to get fired on my second day of work for viewing porn on a company computer in front of everyone, even though it was a legitimate accident.So now I don't want my links to be clickable. If there's a link I'll highlight it and paste it into Firefox manually.[1] If you do not know what sounding is, I do not recommend you look it up, just know that it's a weird sex thing that I wish I didn't know about and cannot unsee.

derefr: In every implementation I've seen, the link only becomes clickable if you hold down a modifier key. By default, the links are just text. Which makes sense, because otherwise it'd be impossible to highlight the underlying text to copy-and-paste it. (Or to send a click event to the underlying PTY-controlling process-group leader when mouse reporting is active.)Also, sounding isn't a weird sex thing per se; it's a mundane (and somewhat painful) medical procedure. One that some people happen to coincidentally have a kink for. But I think that's true of many/most medical procedures.

tombert: It was iTerm, and yeah I it did require a modifier key.I had gotten it in my head that the way that you highlight a line in iTerm (and I have no idea where I heard this or why I thought it) was holding command and clicking on the line. It was a mistake I made exactly once.I am afraid I didn't investigate sounding after I saw the horrifying image; I only learned the name for it after I described the image to someone and they told me what it was; I guess I assumed it was just a weird sex thing, I didn't realize that there was any practical medicine stuff to it.

dust42: I really think this is a security disaster waiting to happen, landing right in time for all the agentic terminal apps: printf '\e]8;;http://evil.com\e\\https://good.com\e]8;;\e\\\n' The next step would be to embedd a full javascript VM in the terminal and a CSS engine.

knodi123: > the link only becomes clickable if you hold down a modifier key.Fun trick not a lot of people know -In a web browser, links which are normally clickable become UN-clickable if you hold a modifier. On a mac, it's (option). It's helpful if you want to select text inside a large link (or in a button) so you can copy it.

sheept: This might be operating system/browser-specific. On Windows Chrome, shift-click opens in new window, ctrl in new tab, and alt downloads the link.

westurner: You probably could have just loudly explained to your reddit coworkers