Dealing with URLs in Messages

Now, let's look at messages that have URLs embedded in the text. Until you discover the nifty little program ``urlview'' you're stuck copying text by hand and pasting it into the window of your web browser. If that system works for you, than leave well enough alone. For everyone else, urlview makes things quite a bit easier. As usual, urlview is a standalone program that interfaces well with mutt. You can configure it to launch a graphical browser like Firefox, Opera, or Konqueror if you have the X Window system running and launch lynx or links if you don't. Fortunately it's easy for urlview to distinguish whether or not you're using X and proceed smoothly from there.

First, install urlview. Second, add the following lines to your .muttrc:

macro index \cb |urlview\n 'call urlview to extract URLs out of a message'

The macro above sets the key binding control-B to launch urlview (more about macros in section 5.3. Try it once and you'll see how nice a system it is.