TTY::Link

Hyperlinks in your terminal

TTY::Link allows you to test whether a terminal supports hyperlinks and print them to the console. It is a component in TTY toolkit.

Terminal emulators such as iTerm2 or GNOME, XFCE that use VTE widget support web style hyperlinks via Ctrl+click or Cmd+click.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "tty-link"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install tty-link

Usage

To print hyperlink in your terminal do:

puts TTY::Link.link_to("TTY toolkit", "https://ttytoolkit.org")
# =>
# TTY toolkit

In cases when the terminal cannot support hyperlinks, an alternative is printed:

# TTY toolkit -> https://ttytoolkit.org

API

new

:plain

The new method accepts the :plain keyword to define a text-only hyperlink replacement template. The link_to method uses the template to create a plain URL alternative on terminals without hyperlink support.

The template can contain two tokens, the :name and the :url. The tokens are optional. The :name -> :url is the default template. The link_to method replaces the present token with the given argument.

For example, given a link to https://ttytoolkit.org named TTY Toolkit:

link.link_to("TTY Toolkit", "https://ttytoolkit.org")

This will create the following string from the default template:

"TTY toolkit -> https://ttytoolkit.org"

To change the default template and display links, for example, with the name and the URL surrounded by brackets:

link = TTY::Link.new(plain: ":name (:url)")

Then passing the same arguments to the link_to method:

link.link_to("TTY Toolkit", "https://ttytoolkit.org")

This will create the following string from the custom template:

"TTY toolkit (https://ttytoolkit.org)"

link_to

The link_to method accepts two arguments, the name and the URL. The second URL argument is optional.

For example, to create a hyperlink to https://ttytoolkit.org named TTY Toolkit:

link.link_to("TTY Toolkit", "https://ttytoolkit.org")

To create a hyperlink where the name is the same as the URL:

link.link_to("https://ttytoolkit.org")

:attrs

The link_to method accepts the :attrs keyword to define attributes for a hyperlink. Note that currently, hyperlink-capable terminals support only the id attribute. However, there is no limitation on the attribute names to allow future support.

For example, to define the id attribute:

link.link_to("TTY Toolkit", "https://ttytoolkit.org", attrs: {id: "tty-toolkit"})

To define many attributes such as id, lang and title:

link.link_to("TTY Toolkit", "https://ttytoolkit.org", attrs: {
  id: "tty-toolkit", lang: "en", title: "Terminal Apps The Easy Way"
})

Supported Terminals

The TTY::Link supports hyperlink generation in the following terminals:

• Alacritty
• Contour
• DomTerm
• foot
• Hyper
• iTerm2
• JediTerm
• kitty
• Konsole
• mintty
• Rio
• Tabby
• Terminology
• VSCode
• VTE (GNOME, Xfce, ROXTerm, Guake, sakura, Terminator)
• WezTerm
• Windows Terminal

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https:/piotrmurach/tty-link. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the TTY::Link project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2019 Piotr Murach. See LICENSE.txt for further details.