A very simple link opener script

mtime: 2023-09-19

I use newsboat (my atom/rss reader of choice) for more purposes than just opening links:

• Following blogs, some of which have full content feeds and some of which don’t
• Following youtube channels I’m interested in
• Reading some full content news feeds, some of which link to photos, other articles, videos etc.
• Most recently, following other people’s gemlogs

The point is, I ‘consume’ these various kinds of content in various ways, and so far I didn’t really have a neat way of doing it. I’d open most links in my web browser, and I had macros for opening youtube links in mpv, and for gemini links I’d manually copy them, which was obviously a bad solution.

Well, the other day, a friend was setting up his newsboat config and he asked me if I have some vim-keybinds reconfiguration. I shared my whole config with him, and he said he’s going to write a link-opening script, using the switch-case statement in sh. At first, I didn’t like the idea, but I soon realized it’d be more convenient than adding more macros, even though there’d be potential for errors. So, I wrote it and I’ve been using it for a couple of days now.

The script itself

# link opener script
#!/usr/bin/sh

case "$1" in
    *youtube*) mpv --profile=720p "$1" ;;
    *\.png*) curl --output /tmp/image.png "$1" && sxiv /tmp/image.png ;;
    *\.jpeg*) curl --output /tmp/image.jpeg "$1" && sxiv /tmp/image.jpeg ;;
    *\.jpg*) curl --output /tmp/image.jpg "$1" && sxiv /tmp/image.jpg ;;
    *.pdf) zathura "$1" ;;
    http*) qutebrowser "$1" ;;
    gemini*) amfora "$1" ;;
esac

There are no syntactical problems, at least not according to shellcheck, but that doesn’t mean there are no problems with the logic.

Problems I’m aware of:

• Not all YouTube links lead to playable content; e.g. if I tried to open a link to a YouTube channel, the operation would just fail.
• Possibly not all links containing “.png” or other image extensions lead to images.
• If a link containing an image extension is hosted on gemini, opening will fail.

Assume there are many more unknown problems.

Potential mitigation of failures: Add an || statement at the end of each case; if opening fails, copy “$1” to xclip.

Setup

I’ve just changed the newsboat browser to the script. I press ‘o’ and it opens the selected media in the right application, as expected, 99.9% of the time (so far).

# relevant newsboat config line
# sets the default browser to qutebrowser
browser "~/.config/newsboat/link_opener.sh"

Conclusion: I’ve got some pretty smart friends. Here’s a link to his plain-web log:

Luka’s Attic

Take care until the next time :)