From d87c22be1700e064d15b0cd1de19a3c65d376261 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Sebastiano Tronto <sebastiano@tronto.net>
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:35:39 +0200
Subject: New blog post

---
 .../2026-06-28-tmux-open-urls/tmux-open-urls.md    | 54 ++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 54 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 src/blog/2026-06-28-tmux-open-urls/tmux-open-urls.md

(limited to 'src/blog/2026-06-28-tmux-open-urls')

diff --git a/src/blog/2026-06-28-tmux-open-urls/tmux-open-urls.md b/src/blog/2026-06-28-tmux-open-urls/tmux-open-urls.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..aaaf3a6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/src/blog/2026-06-28-tmux-open-urls/tmux-open-urls.md
@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+# tmux trick #3: open URLs without the mouse
+
+*This post is part of a [series](../../series)*
+
+My [last post in this series](../2026-05-17-tmux-clipboard) on copy mode
+was inspired by an old `.tmux.conf` file that I found in a backup folder.
+In that same file I also had a command that selects all URLs that are
+visible in the current pane, shows them to the user in a
+[dmenu](https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu) session, and opens the
+selected URL in a browser. This command is bound to `C-b u` with
+the following configuration line:
+
+```
+bind u run "tmux capture-pane; tmux show-buffer | urlgrep | dmenu -l | xargs firefox"
+```
+
+This command is a great example of UNIX program composability. Let's break it down!
+
+## The pipeline
+
+First, `tmux capture-pane` copies all the text of the current pane in
+its copy buffer. Then `tmux show-buffer` prints the current copy buffer
+to standard output - we talked about this last time.
+
+This text is then [piped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(Unix))
+into `urlgrep`, a custom script that I wrote by copy-pasting a regular
+expression from some StackOverflow answer:
+
+```
+#!/bin/sh
+
+protocols='http|https|ftp|sftp|gemini|mailto'
+valid_chars="][a-zA-Z0-9_~/?#@!$&'()*+=.,;:-"
+regex="(($protocols):|www\.)[$valid_chars]+"
+
+egrep -o "$regex"
+```
+
+This [grep](../2023-08-20-grep) command selects all URLs from its standard
+input and prints them out one per line. These URLs are then sent to dmenu,
+a graphical tool that prompts the user to select one of the items it received
+in its standard input. The `-l` option is used to change `dmenu`'s layout so
+that it shows one option per line.
+
+The user's selection is then printed by `dmenu` to standard output; so we
+use `xargs` to convert it to an argument for the `firefox` command. And
+that's it! You can now follow links from your terminal using only your keyboard.
+
+## Caveats
+
+If a URL is broken into multiple lines, my `urlgrep` script is only going to
+select it until the end of the first line, so you won't be able to open
+it correctly with this configuration. However, I found this to be a common
+issue in many terminal emulators.
-- 
cgit v1.3