Add Option To Disable Hyperlinks

[aecooper]

Feature request:
Please add an option to disable hyperlinks underlining and click action in text displayed in the terminal. Why?:

• It can corrupt the display. E.g. Debian12 when using the journalctl command as long entries can contain URLs and coloured formatting.
• I want to be able to click on text without it being launched in another app.

I am fine with a config file only option if that helps.

Many thanks :-).

[egmontkob]

Are you talking about "explicit hyperlinks", when an application emits a piece of that that is supposed to work like links on the web? E.g. produced with ls --hyperlink. These are marked by light dotted underline.

Or are you talking about when an application prints a piece of text that looks like an URL, e.g. echo http://example.com, and the terminal on its own recognizes this? These aren't underlined by default, only when you mouse over.

It can corrupt the display.

Can you please elaborate? What display problems do you exactly experience? How does the corruption look like?

Can you please attach a script(1) log of such a session (taking care that it doesn't contain sensitive data)?

The explicit hyperlinks feature of terminals was designed not to cause display corruption. The supposedly visible clickable text is displayed, whereas the target (the link it would take you to) is not. For auto-detected hyperlinks this is irrelevant, there's no corruption whatsoever that they could ever cause.

If you experience different behavior then I assume some component (e.g. journalctl, or less that presents its output) mangles those sequences and explicitly asks for that piece that you consider "corrupting" to be displayed. If so, if the "corrupted" result is what the application asks for, disabling hyperlinks in the terminal won't change anything, you'll need to get those apps fixed.

I want to be able to click on text without it being launched in another app.

Clicking on the text does not launch anything. You have to Ctrl+click.

[egmontkob]

terminatorlib/terminal.py has a self.vte.set_allow_hyperlink(True) call near line 149. If you comment that out, support for explicit hyperlinks will be disabled. (Autodetected hyperlinks will remain.)

Does it change the display in any way (other than the omission of those light dotted underlines)? I'm fairly certain it doesnt.

[aecooper]

Thank you for your quick reply :-).

Indeed the issue is with the explicit hyperlinks. Interestingly resizing the window to accommodate the offending red line corrects the issue. However trying (ls --hyperlink ; ls) | less -FMRS with a very long file name works.

Commenting out the line you mention solves the issue (where ever it may lie).

Would it be possible to add an option to turn that feature off? Ideally I'd like to turn off the other type of underline as well but I don't think that's allowed in VTE from my quick look through the docs.

I've attached some screenshots as requested. You can see in one that the dotted underline persists after I exited journalctl.

Many thanks once again :-)

[egmontkob]

Just so that I understand the problem... the red /run/user... filename is supposed to be a hyperlink, but the problem is that all lines underneath it are also marked as hyperlink which they shouldn't be?

It looks to me a bug in less -R, or journalctl not invoking it with the -R option, or less being too old to handle this option properly. Probably the middle one of these, since you say ls --hyperlink | less -R works correctly for you.

What less receives is a text flow that goes like:

timestamp spaces systemd[1253]: INSTRUCTION-TO-START-HYPERLINK /run/user/blahblah/long/filename INSTRUCTION-TO-END-HYPERLINK and the line still continues
timestamp spaces systemd[1253]: whatever the next line is

and by chopping off the right edge to fit the contents on the screen, it also chops off the instruction-to-end-hyperlink, so subsequent text is still printed as hyperlink.

Looks like a bug in less if it does that, or the lack of the desired -R option.

There's nothing Terminator / VTE could do to correct this mistake -- apart from completely disabling the hyperlink feature.

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Ideally I'd like to turn off the other type of underline as well but I don't think that's allowed in VTE from my quick look through the docs.

You mean autodetected hyperlinks, when the printed text is a URL? The way to turn them off is to not install any regex pattern in VTE (those vte.match_add_[g]regex calls).

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Would it be possible to add an option to turn that feature off?

I'm not a Terminator developer so I can't comment on what options its author will add. (I'm an occasional VTE co-dev.)

All I can say here is that wrt. hyperlinks, Terminator here seems to work as expected, it's the journalctl + less combo that asks it to keep linkifying the text, i.e. they emit undesired output.

I personally find the hyperlink feature super-duper useful in general, so I'd rather not disable it but work towards fixing the source of this particular problem. Of course if you don't need this feature then you can disable it.

[aecooper]

Hi, I wasn't suggesting turning it off by default. I do appreciate that others find it useful and that it should be enabled by default, but just to have an option in terminator to turn it off. Other terminals have work around options, e.g. konsole has both options mentioned above. Unfortunately, although I'm a KDE user, konsole has/had issues with font scaling on larger monitors and now that terminator highlights searches it's become my go to terminal :-).

Interestingly I have just tried konsole with both options enabled (i.e. highlight both types of hyperlinks) and it works fine (I disabled them because I didn't like the features not because it caused issues).

Anyway make thanks for all your help and the tips to disable both features in the meantime.