On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 01:37:29PM +1300, martin f krafft wrote:
Yes, it does. I think Chris' and José's points were more about
requiring an external tool to provide functionality which has become so
core to everyday email use that mutt could learn to do it.
Urlview also obstructs your view to context when using it. I've opened
it a million times only to find myself staring at a list of tracking
URLs that all look the same, now knowing which one appeared in the
paragraph I was just reading. Mutt could do a much better job, with a
UI/UX similar to what rxvt-unicode offers (but cannot due to
ncurses…), i.e.:
Yes, that's precisely what I meant. Problems when selecting URLs come
precisely from two very precise e-mail types:
1. Very long URL compilations. Say RISKS Digest, for instance. If anyone
here is subscribed, they know what I mean.
2. Newsletters with tracking links.
To me, the gold standard of "selecting URLs while in text mode to be
sent to the browser" is a plugin for irssi ("the mutt of IRC clients",
I'd say) called simply url.pl. It tracks which URLs have been posted to
all channels one is into and prepends a number between brackets. When
one wants to visit a given address (let's say, just for this example,
that I want to visit the third URL that was posted), just has to send
the command /url 3, and it will be sent to Firefox.
Now, visualizing HTML e-mail with elinks -dumps or something similar
also prepends a number between brackets, but I have found that urlview
and elinks don't always agree on the numbering. In the end, if the
e-mail is a complex HTML newsletter, I just open it with Firefox and
click on whatever links I want to read. If it's a text message, I select
the URL with the mouse and paste it in the address bar of a new Firefox
tab. It takes just a few seconds of my time, it's not a big deal... but
it could be better :-)
Cheers,
--
José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org
