hyperlinks look the same as text

[flying-strawberry]

Ghostty has support for terminal hyperlinks but is there a way to distinguish them from other text.

printf '\e]8;;https://example.com\e\\This is a link\e]8;;\e\\\n'

[00-kat]

I should mention, holding down ctrl (Linux) or cmd (macOS) and hovering over a link will underline it.

I do believe that there should be some indication without doing this, so I'm keeping this discussion open as “indication without holding down modifier” (which may have actually been what was actually requested). There was some related previous discussion in #3903 and #4382.

[kaddkaka]

Requiring a modifier keyy makes it very unlikely to discover a hyperlink unless the visible text looks like a uri in itself.

Static decorator like

• background color change
• underline, or
• first character foreground color
  even when not hovering the link might be ok, but might also be too intrusive. (are there escape codes to print text with underline that the tui application programmer can use to indicate hyperlinks?)

Having an indication simply on hover would greatly improve discoverability. I would also prefer to not have to hold ctrl for a click to follow the link.

[kaddkaka]

For reference, this is how mindbogglingly complex our URL regex is: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/src/config/url.zig#L25-L33

URLs aren't at all trivial to parse, and what you are proposing isn't feasible without sacrificing performance.

In that case I agree, doing it for only OSC8 sounds good.

How simple is OSC8 to detect?

[pluiedev]

We already keep track of them — the only thing that needs to be done here is to render them differently

[tiesmaster]

I've also ran into the issue that URLs are pretty difficult to detect, and found this discussion. It looks like the consensus is to make URLs better discoverable for OSC8, shall I make an issue for this?

[rhodes-b]

No issues are only made by maintainers once its a accepted feature request

[michaelfortunato]

Interested in this as well--having an option to have hover automatically underline the link (no modifier needed). Not sure how complex a PR would be. I am hoping the hover detection code could be reused from whatever code was written for the modifier case.