Opening URLs from mutt (was: Creating HTML emails with mutt)

[José María Mateos]

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