Scenario: Add support for hyperlinks

[zadjii-msft]

This is the the megathread for tracking all the remaining work that needs to be done for hyperlink support in Terminal.

"Soon" Timeframe

• [x] Original issue: #204 -> added in #7251
• [x] Allow file:// URIs -> added in #7526
• [ ] #7562 Allow other URI schemes
• [x] Render hyperlinks differently from regular text in Terminal -> added in #7420
• [x] Hover underline text that have the same hyperlink ID and display the URI -> added in #7420
• [x] Display a content dialog box for URIs we cannot parse/schemes we do not support -> added in #7523
• [x] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/574 Add support for Terminal to auto-detect hyperlinks -> added in #7691
• [ ] #7563 Switch the pointer to the 👆 icon when we're hovering a link (in the clickable state, like with ctrl pressed)
• [ ] VtEngine::_SetHyperlink uses fmt::format to render the hyperlinks, and it should really use _WriteFormattedString
• [ ] #7564 Hook up hyperlinks to conhost (rendering + clicking)
• [ ] #7565 Make sure hyperlinks are included in HTML copy
• [x] #8123 Only underline hyperlinks on hover -> added in #8148
• [ ] ~Controlling tooltip delay for URLs #8242~
  • Abandoned, platform limitation
• [x] ~Add a setting to disable auto detection of links (in PR #8239)~
  • Abandoned, we're not sure anyone actually ever wanted this
• [ ] Links/URLs get offset when certain unicode characters are printed #8709
• [x] url detection not working with tmux #9117
• [ ] Keyboard navigation of clickable link #6649
• [ ] #11901

Backlog

• [ ] Add a setting to configure the regex used to detect patterns
• [ ] Allow "hyperlink" matching for arbitrary patterns and adding custom handlers #8849
  • Theoretically, this could supersede #7562
  • Should be self-consistent with #8294
• [ ] Control the styling of hyperlinks - attributes used for autodetected hyperlinks, and then different attributes for hovered ones #8294
• [ ] Feature Request: link generation for files + other data types #2671

References

• This VsCode issue has an enormous set of references to improvements they've made: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/172084

[DHowett]

Proposed order of attack:

• Hover tooltip
• Rendering -- possibly simple rendering w/ a new underline style for me?
• Take a break, regroup, think about the design for autodetection
• (possibly work on other things in the meantime)
• Autodetection

[zadjii-msft]

Hey so hover tooltip might be hard - we can't embed a webview, so doing something like

Might be especially hard. But we could start with a TeachingTip sytle one for now

Unless we could somehow pre-render a web page to an image and display that in the tooltip. Or use something like the "social" image from github (though I haven't the damndest clue how that works.)

Maybe we should just start with

Open [web page | file]: 
{url}

in the tooltip

[DHowett]

Yeah i definitely think tooltip and “the link preview from the video” are different workitems that we should tackle separately :)

[j4james]

If you have to have a "link preview", I'd recommend something really basic based on the page meta data (like the meta title and description, and maybe a favicon and/or og:image). But as cool as this might seem, I don't think it's practical for a hover effect given the delay needed to download and render these things (unless you're pre-rendering the previews, which sounds like a really bad idea).

Which brings me to the main problem. Even if you're only connecting to the site on hover, that still seems inadvisable. When I'm using a terminal I really wouldn't expect it to be making internet connections without my consent. So this feature would definitely have to be optional, and arguably I think should be off by default.

I'm possibly a little biased here, because my internet connection is metered to a certain extent. But even if that weren't the case, would most people be comfortable with their terminal downloading unknown webpages in the background?

[DHowett]

Yeah, I definitely don't think that "fetch any link I hover over" is something we should ship in core or opt-in by default. It makes for a really compelling video because it shows how modern and flashy we are, but it's too much of a disclosure and safety risk to put right into our project.

[jzabroski]

• Allow mailto: URIs

Would this be RFC conforming 😒 mailto: URL, or 😍 mailto: URL that allows multiple email addresses?

[DHowett]

Generally, "whatever type of thing is supported by the registered protocol handler" ;P

[jantari]

I don't know whether this has been considered already, but when doing a rich-text copy of the terminal buffer the hyperlinks should probably be preserved on paste

[DHowett]

Thanks @jantari! Just added that to the main scenario body.

[giggio]

I just built the latest commit, but it can't parse an url, you have to use the escape sequences. Is this use case planned:

echo 'Hello from Windows Terminal: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/'

And then click on the link and it opens?

[DHowett]

@giggio er..

[DHowett]

I don't just say these things for fun 😉 (edit: this was intended to be read as "funny", not "wow Dustin's a jerk" (but I get it!))

[giggio]

I had seen that comment, I was just not sure that this is what it meant, thanks for the clarification, Dustin! And good thing you explained, so I could see it as funny. ;)

So, if I understand correctly, we don't have yet an issue tracking this item (auto-detection) specifically?

[DHowett]

@giggio There's a lot of discussion about how to do autodetection in the comments on https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/574 :smile: so we're somewhat treating that issue as canonical.

[simonratner]

Question about url detection in 1.5.3142.

Works great in the terminal, but not inside vi. Is the app doing something special to disable this, or a different mode that url detection does not work with? I was really hoping to be able to Ctrl-Click all those documentation links in code comments.

[DHowett]

So, Vim (if that's your vi implementation of choice) enables "mouse mode" -- it lets you select text and navigate the document with your mouse. You can either turn off mouse mode (:set mouse=) or temporarily suppress it by holding down Shift.

(This is also the reason that you cannot select text using the terminal when Vim is running.)

[jantari]

Thanks for the information, "mouse mode" was not turned on by default for me in:

• WSL, Ubuntu 20.04 where I tested vim 8.1
• Windows, where I use neovim v0.5.0-558-g6d1404faf

and links worked OOTB, but I could enable it on either with :set mouse=a and not only did it exhibit the behavior you described but I also learned about mouse-mode today, thanks!

[abhijit-hota]

There's no solid way to detect the version of the Windows Terminal (and this feature) by an application as of now. One more use case to support #1040 .

One way is to trigger wt -v as wt is available in the Path but the again, it shows up an alert rather than just printing it. (Any reasons it does that?)

[DHowett]

any reasons

About a hundred. The rationale for this spec explains why. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/dev/duhowett/spec/console-allocation/doc/specs/%237335%20-%20Console%20Allocation%20Policy.md#abstract

[abhijit-hota]

About a hundred. The rationale for this spec explains why. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/dev/duhowett/spec/console-allocation/doc/specs/%237335%20-%20Console%20Allocation%20Policy.md#abstract

Ah I see. Thanks for the clarification. Waiting for 1040 to get resolved :).

Edit: I don't understand the abstract but I get there are valid reasons.

[GoodClover]

I was wondering if there was any plans to support data: URIs? This could be used to embed a (very small) image or just some plain text that would appear, most likely in a popup.

I saw #6747, which suggest support for parsing them is planned for settings.json icons.

There is some info about data: in terminals here: https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda#gistcomment-2192652

[wongjn]

Is there a way to change to modifier key for a link press? I have grown accustomed to using ALT. I couldn't find anything in the documentation, so it would be nice to have this as a keybind setting if it does not exist already.

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

Is there a way to change to modifier key for a link press?

No, the Ctrl+click combination is hardcoded here:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/9c4950cb32a06b3ba448d10371c7f6977d9d0090/src/cascadia/TerminalControl/TermControl.cpp#L1284-L1288 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/b140299e501e961f09226eba7e023db9b7cdb393/src/cascadia/TerminalControl/Resources/en-US/Resources.resw#L178-L180

If https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1553 were implemented, then users would be able to change the modifier, I think.

[vtjeng]

I have Windows Terminal 1.5.10271.0 installed, and it looks like Ctrl+Click on http://127.0.0.1:5000 actually already works (which is amazing!) - which release was this made available in? (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/releases does not seem to contain anything specific about this). Sorry if this is the wrong issue.

[1] I know that it is in Windows Terminal Preview v1.5.3142.0 but it doesn't seem to be in the regular Winodws Terminal release notes.

[DHowett]

This came out in 1.5!

[vefatica]

ftp:// ... I get underlining and a popup "Ctrl+click" tip but can't follow it.

mailto:// ... nothing.

What's the plan? Thanks.

[DHowett]

to be fair, mailto isn’t traditionally followed by // as it does not designate a path. We have issues tracking both “let me customize the URL regex” and “expand protocol support.”

So that’s the plan.

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

@vefatica, in v1.7.572.0, TerminalPage::_IsUriSupported allows only http, https, and file. Other URI schemes have been discussed in https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/7562.

[vefatica]

What about ftp://? ... not supported? Yet it gets underlined and a popup tip.

I can't remember way back but in recent decades I've always used mailto://. ShellExecuteEx doesn't mind

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

According to https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/pull/7691#discussion_r513595391, ftp: hyperlinks were going to be unblocked "shortly"; but almost five months have passed already. The regex in v1.7.572.0: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/89c9e6db847ed7f262d1f5a7f972ef004320ff6e/src/cascadia/TerminalCore/Terminal.cpp#L87