gagath’s debian devlog

alacritty hints for Launchpad and BTS bugs

Due to a weird font rendering bug in kitty, I switched to alacritty as my primary terminal emulator for the time being.

One missing feature when doing Debian and Ubuntu work is the possibility to click on bug numbers to open them in a web browser. Ubuntu patches gnome-terminal (60_add_lp_handler.patch) to match LP: #2076389 strings and allow to click them to open the corresponding Launchpad bug page.

alacritty does support custom hints with the help of regexes, so we can define our own to open both Launchpad and Debian BTS bugs:

[[hints.enabled]]
regex = "LP: #[\\d]+"
command = { program = "/home/gagath/.config/alacritty/open-bug.py" }
mouse = { enabled = true }

[[hints.enabled]]
regex = "#[\\d]+"
command = { program = "/home/gagath/.config/alacritty/open-bug.py" }
mouse = { enabled = true }

Note that we need to use the full path, because the interpretation of ~ seems to not be supported at the moment in the version I am using. No big deal.

The text captured by the regex will be passed to the specified program. This is why we need some glue code to parse the regex again and to construct the URL out of it, before replacing the script’s process with xdg-open that will open the URL.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import re
import sys
import os

MATCHES = [
    (r"LP: #([\d]+)", "https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/{}"),
    (r"#([\d]+)", "https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug={}"),
]

XDG_OPEN = "/usr/bin/xdg-open"


def url_of_text(text):
    for (regex, url) in MATCHES:
        match = re.match(regex, text)
        if match is None:
            continue
        return url.format(match.group(1))


def main():
    text = sys.argv[1]
    url = url_of_text(text)
    assert url is not None
    os.execv(XDG_OPEN, [XDG_OPEN, url])


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

However, providing custom hints seems to disable the default hint that is used for finding links. So I had to copy-paste it back at the end of the configuration file to make the “classic” hints work again.

[[hints.enabled]]
command = "xdg-open"
hyperlinks = true
post_processing = true
persist = false
mouse.enabled = true
binding = { key = "U", mods = "Control|Shift" }
regex = "(ipfs:|ipns:|magnet:|mailto:|gemini://|gopher://|https://|http://|news:|file:|git://|ssh:|ftp://)[^\u0000-\u001F\u007F-\u009F<>\"\\s{-}\\^⟨⟩`]+"

Maybe the Debian and Ubuntu versions of alacritty could be patched to include this kind of hints by default, but that is left as an exercise for the reader.

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