Clickable Links in Terminal.app!
April 6 2007
Finally! Terminal.app now does what I want! I found a way to give it clickable links!
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Terminal.app is Mac OS X’s terminal emulator. It allows you to interact with the computer through a command-line interface. I use it daily, to (amongst other things) compile and run programs I’m working on, commit changes to my SVN repository, upload files to my website, log into my SUCS account, and to chat to other SUCS members using their terminal-based talker program named Milliways. In short, I use it a lot. And for the most part, it does everything I want, and it does it pretty well. However, there’s been one rather annoying issue: unlike (for instance) GNOME Terminal (a similar, Linux-based program), Terminal doesn’t make URLs clickable. This is most annoying when chatting on Milliways - people paste links fairly regularly, which means I have to highlight the URL with my mouse, copy it, and paste it into a web browser. And if the conversation’s moving especially fast, I have to stop the text scrolling up the screen first. It gets annoying.
Enter ICeCoffEE! ICeCoffEE is a fantastic little program that lets you open URLs in some Mac OS X applications by Command-clicking on them. And it works with Terminal.app! Hooray! So now, when someone pastes a link in Milliways, all I have to do is Command-click it and it appears in my browser. I’ve estimated that it’s increased my Terminal-based link-clicking productivity by almost 80%! :)
Now all I need are tabs in Terminal.app… (coming in Leopard). ;)
Note: At the same time as discovering ICeCoffEE, I found that Terminal.app does have clickable links built in, but they’re not very good. By default, you hold Command and double-click the link - however, it doesn’t appear to be very good at guessing how long a link is, and so doesn’t work very well at all. But it’s OK, because ICeCoffEE does it right!