How does open URL work?

[ephemer4l]

I have just discovered that pressing enter on a selected URL message is supposed to open said URL. Unfortunately, this does not work on my system but I am not getting any error messages. How does gurk URL opening work under the hood? I am guessing that my system is missing some requirements for this.

[boxdot]

This is done here

gurk-rs/src/app.rs

Line 1653 in 6bcc592

if let Err(error) = opener::open(url) {

. We use this crate for opening urls: https://docs.rs/opener/latest/opener/.

You could try to replace this open::open call by https://docs.rs/opener/latest/opener/fn.open_browser.html. Aparently, it will use then the default browser.

[ephemer4l]

Thanks a lot for the quick response. Honestly, I can't figure out how opener really uses xdg-open. I have a custom shell script called xdg-open that I use to open files but it seems that this does not work.

They are using

fn open_with_system_xdg_open(path: &OsStr) -> io::Result<Child> {
    Command::new("xdg-open")
        .arg(path)
        .stdin(Stdio::null())
        .stdout(Stdio::null())
        .stderr(Stdio::null())
        .spawn()
}

to open the file at first. This should just launch my custom script but it doesn't for some reason.

Edit: Even weirder thing is that the opener crate works fine when I try it on its own.

[boxdot]

Let's try to debug your script then. You can apply this patch

diff --git a/src/app.rs b/src/app.rs
index ecb7a27..4d4e0c4 100644
--- a/src/app.rs
+++ b/src/app.rs
@@ -1647,12 +1647,29 @@ fn to_emoji(s: &str) -> Option<&str> {
 }
 
 fn open_url(message: &Message, url_regex: &Regex) -> Option<()> {
+    use std::io::Write;
+
     let text = message.message.as_ref()?;
     let m = url_regex.find(text)?;
     let url = m.as_str();
-    if let Err(error) = opener::open(url) {
+
+    let mut file = std::fs::OpenOptions::new()
+        .create(true)
+        .append(true)
+        .open("/tmp/open.log")
+        .unwrap();
+    writeln!(&mut file, "opening {url}").unwrap();
+
+    if let Err(error) = std::process::Command::new("xdg-open")
+        .arg(url)
+        .stdin(std::process::Stdio::null())
+        .stdout(file.try_clone().unwrap())
+        .stderr(file.try_clone().unwrap())
+        .spawn()
+    {
         error!(url, %error, "failed to open");
     }
+
     Some(())
 }

When opening an url, it will write the stdout/stderr of xdg-open command to /tmp/open.log. You can then check what is going on there.

Just a side note: the url regex is sometimes broken for some reason. So, try it with a simple url.
Actually, this is not a regex bug, but an offset bug when opening an url behind a date separator.

[ephemer4l]

Sorry for the late response, unfortunately I am unable to test this because for some reason I can't compile zerocopy when trying to build with cargo build. Weirdly enough this works when I am using cargo install.

Edit: --release works, testing now. False alarm