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using urlview remotely (was: pager: avoid line breaks in URLs)



also sprach Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2008.11.16.0453 +0100]:
> > And as long as urlview cannot deal with X (I read mail on my 
> > mailserver, which has no X, and want to open URLs locally), it's of 
> > little use...
> 
> Eh? What's X got to do with it? urlview just runs whatever program you 
> want. It can run firefox if you want it to, and if your DISPLAY 
> setting is correct, firefox will display on your local system (even 
> though it's running on the remote system). That's not the issue, the 
> issue is sending the url from the remote system to firefox running on 
> your local system, and that's got *nothing* to do with X or with 
> urlview.

Alright, you busted me with your nitpicking. :)

What I mean is: I cannot fathom a way in which I could have the
remote urlview pop up pages on my likal firefox *without* installing
firefox (and thus half of X) on the remote machine (which just won't
happen).

So the rant is against firefox, though arguably I don't know how to
fix it. The clickable (and potentially tab-able) terminal links
seemed like an elegant way out.

> Personally, that's why I use mutt locally, reading email via IMAP.

I do most of the time too, but not always.

> But it shouldn't be too hard to set up a simple little URL
> launcher that you could tunnel over ssh. The local side would be
> something really simple, like this:
> 
>     #!/bin/bash
>     while read url ; do
>         firefox -a firefox -remote "openurl($url)"
>     done

The problem is how to tell urlview where it can find this launcher,
which may sit behind a NAT box.

> The real trick to it would be setting up ssh to do the tunnel, 
> launching the local script, and ensuring that the remote side sends 
> the URL to the right place.

Of course, I could create a TCP tunnel with ssh -R and then simply
let urlview echo URLs to netcat to hit the launcher after passing
the tunnel, but that has major shortcomings:

  - URLs are opened on the machine which has the oldest connection,
    not on the local machine (when using multiple machines)
  - If the connection goes down, this stops working until a new
    connection has been established

It sounds like too much trouble for too little gain.

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