Terminal: 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.

• [x] Original issue: #204 -> added in #7251
• [ ] Allow file:// URIs (in PR #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
• [ ] Control the styling of hyperlinks - atrributes used for autodetected hyperlinks, and then different attributes for hovered ones #8294
• [ ] Add a setting to disable auto detection of links (in PR #8293)
• [ ] Add a setting to configure the regex used to detect patterns

[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:

bash 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!