Open custom hyperlinks in a terminal text editor at a given line/column

[eugenesvk]

WezTerm has this great feature of Explicit Hyperlinks where various shell apps can mark their output as links with custom handler scheme so that, for example, you can use delta as a pager for ripgrep with a custom link scheme to click on the file name with a match to open that file at an exact line/column position (columns support is planned in delta).

For a GUI editor, you'd use your OS link registration facilities (see open-in-editor) and let the default WezTerm handler handle it, but then for terminal editors it doesn't work and you need to deal with the handlers directly in the terminal, so you can use the code below to register a custom URI handler filter that would type the proper editor /path/to/file command for you in a new tab (similarly to how a GUI editor would open it in a new tab)

Limitations:

• various editors require different line/column syntax, the code below you can just paste the link as is as an argument, otherwise you might need to extract the value of a line/column and pass it explicitly
• this only works for mouse click (there is an open issue to add a mouse-free option, so in the future this can also be extended to use a keybind to open any regex match)
• doesn't check whether you already have the same file opened in the same terminal editor (unlike the GUI editor that would not open a duplicate tab, but switch to the existing tab). While there is a way to cycle through opened processes to identify if another is running, not sure how to ask it to switch to different coords in this file

local act = wezterm.action
local function hURI_editLnCn(win, pane, uri)
  local prefix	= 'file-line-column://' -- 'file-line-column:///path/to/file.txt:ln:col'
  -- the exact scheme of the URL depends on the editor, so ↑ and editor arguments ↓ need to be adjusted to reflect that
  -- https://github.com/dandavison/open-in-editor/blob/master/open-in-editor
  local prefix_re	= prefix:escmagic() -- escape -:/
  local prefix_beg, prefix_end = uri:find('^'..prefix_re)
  if prefix_beg == 1 then
    local editor_cli = '/path/to/your/terminal/text/editor'
    local uri_target = uri:sub(prefix_end + 1)
    win:perform_action(act.SpawnCommandInNewTab {args={editor_cli,uri_target}},pane)
    return false -- prevent the default action from opening in a browser
  end
  -- no return value → allow later handlers and ultimately the default action to run
end
wezterm.on('open-uri', hURI_editLnCn) -- open file-line-column URIs in a terminal text editor

Add this snippet to your custom lua std library add import it to your config with the code ↑

string.escmagic	= function(self, str)	return self:gsub("([^%w])", "%%%1")	end