Alacritty open links with modifier

note, Jun 25, 2023, on Mitja Felicijan's blog

Alacritty by default makes all links in the terminal output clickable and this gets annoying rather quickly. I liked the default behavior of Gnome terminal where you needed to hold Control key and then you could click and open links.

To achieve this in Alacritty you need to provide a hint in the configuration file. Config file is located at ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml.

hints:
  enabled:
  - regex: "(mailto:|gemini:|gopher:|https:|http:|news:|file:|git:|ssh:|ftp:)\
            [^\u0000-\u001F\u007F-\u009F<>\"\\s{-}\\^⟨⟩`]+"
    command: xdg-open
    post_processing: true
    mouse:
      enabled: true
      mods: Control

The following should work under any Linux system. For macOS, you will need to change command: xdg-open to something else.

Now the links will be visible and clickable only when Control key is being pressed.

Source: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/5246


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