Opening http link under the cursor in vim

Mr. Walter Bright, creator of the D programming language, recently commented on Hacker News:

And for bug fixes, reference the issue which often gives a detailed explanation for why the code is a certain way:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/src/dmd/backend/cgxmm.d#L1210

Ever since I enhanced the editor I use to open the browser on links, this sort of thing has proven to be very, very handy.

I’ve never had any issue with opening links from vim: I have <leader>y set up in Visual mode to yank stuff into the system-wide clipboard which I can then paste into the browser. However, ever since I mapped <leader>gh to trigger :GBrowse that opens a browser tab instantly, the old “select, copy, alt-tab to browser, ctrl+t, ctrl+v” flow started to feel… prehistoric. Mr. Bright’s comment gave me the final nudge to actually go ahead and set it up.

The good folks from the developer encyclopedia suggested gx but for some reason, setting g:netrw_browsex_viewer didn’t seem to do anything so the command would always wget the link then tell the browser to open that downloaded file. Therefore, I cobbled together this snippet which was adapted from those stackoverflow & github threads:

function! OpenURL()
  let l:url = matchstr(expand("<cWORD>"), 'https\=:\/\/[^ >,;()]*')
  if l:url != ""
    let l:url = shellescape(l:url, 1)
    let l:command = "!xdg-open ".l:url
    echo l:command
    silent exec l:command
  else
    echo "No URL found under cursor."
  endif
endfunction

nnoremap gl :call OpenURL()<cr>

(if you’re on a Mac, replacing xdg-open with open will probably do the same thing)

Now whenever I have my cursor on an http(s) url, I can type gl from normal mode and xdg-open will use my default browser to open it up. This could be extended to any other scheme like mailto or ftp but I don’t have any practical use for them right now so that will do.

One drawback is if there’s a whitespace in the URL (which is bad practice anyway), my regex won’t match the whole thing. In such cases I’d rather resort to good old manual visual mode than try to be clever and make my URL detecting logic exponentially more complex. I’d take simple software with obvious, easily understood behavior over overcomplicated, (possibly) subtly broken balls of mud any day.

By the way, if you looked at my script and got spooked by the idea of executing a shell command composed from arbitrary, potentially unsafe input (i.e. text file content), don’t worry: that’s what shellescape() is for.

[SRE-123456] Finally fix the goddamn pipeline

function! OpenJira()
  let l:jira_id = toupper(matchstr(expand("<cWORD>"), '\c\(id2\|sre\|csi\)-[0-9]\+'))
  if l:jira_id != ""
    let l:command = "!xdg-open https://my-company.atlassian.net/browse/".l:jira_id
    echo l:command
    silent exec l:command
  else
    echo "No Jira ticket found under cursor."
  endif
endfunction
nnoremap gj :call OpenJira()<cr>