I have an unusual X desktop environment that has evolved over a long period, and as part of that I have an equally unusual and slowly evolved set of ways to handle URLs. By 'handle URLs', what I mean is going from an URL somewhere (email, text in a terminal, etc) to having the URL open in one of my several browser environments. Tied into this is handling non-URL things that I also want to open in a browser, for example searching for various sorts of things in various web places.

The simplest place to start is at the end. I have several browser environments and to go along with them I have a script for each that opens URLs provided as command line arguments in a new window of that browser. If there's no command line arguments, the scripts open a default page (usually a blank page, but for my main browser it's a special start page of links ). For most browsers this works by running 'firefox <whatever>' and so will start the browser if it's not already running, but for my main browser I use a lightweight program that uses Firefox's X-based remote control protocol . which means I have to start the browser outside of it.

Layered on top of these browser specific scripts is a general script to open URLs that I call 'openurl'. The purpose of openurl is to pick a browser environment based on the particular site I'm going to. For example, if I'm opening the URL of a site where I know I need JavaScript, the script opens the URL in my special 'just make it work' JavaScript enabled Firefox. Most urls open in my normal, locked down Firefox. I configure programs like Thunderbird to open URLs through this openurl script, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly .

(I haven't tried to hook openurl into the complex mechanisms that xdg-open uses to decide how to open URLs . Probably I should but the whole xdg-open thing irritates me.)

Layered on top of openurl and the specific browser scripts is a collection of scripts that read the X selection and do a collection of URL-related things with it. One script reads the X selection, looks for it being a URL, and either feeds the URL to openurl or just runs openurl to open my start page. Other scripts feed the URL to alternate browser environments or do an Internet search for the selection. Then I have a fvwm menu with all of these scripts in it and one of my fvwm mouse button bindings brings up this menu. This lets me select a URL in a terminal window, bring up the menu, and open it in either the default browser choice or a specific browser choice.

(I also have a menu entry for 'open the selection in my main browser' in one of my main fvwm menus, the one attached to the middle mouse button, which makes it basically reflexive to open a new browser window or open some URL in my normal browser.)

The other way I handle URLs is through dmenu . One of the things my dmenu environment does is recognize URLs and open them in my default browser environment. I also have short dmenu commands to open URLs in my other browser environments, or open URLs based on the parameters I pass the command (such as a 'pd' script that opens Python documentation for a standard library module). Dmenu itself can paste in the current X selection with a keystroke, which makes it convenient to move URLs around . Dmenu is also how I typically open a URL if I'm typing it in instead of copying it from the X selection, rather than opening a new browser window, focusing the URL bar, and entering the URL there.

(I have dmenu set up to also recognize 'about:*' as URLs and have various Firefox about: things pre-configured as hidden completions in dmenu, along with some commonly used website URLs .)

As mentioned, dmenu specifically opens plain URLs in my default browser environment rather than going through openurl . I may change this someday but in practice there aren't enough special sites that it's an issue. Also, I've made dedicated little dmenu-specific scripts that open up the various sites I care about in the appropriate browser, so I can type ' mastodon ' in dmenu to open up my Fediverse account in the JavaScript-enabled Firefox instance.