The magic of dingus-clicking

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

When I got Red Hat 6.1 and started Gnome, I'd find that in 
gnome-terminals, addresses such as http://www.gnome.org were
underlined when the mouse cursor moved over them. Alas, nothing
much would happen.

After I upgraded to October Gnome, holding down the control
key and clicking on the highlighted url would start up netscape
on the relevant page.

This is utterly cool. Completely bizarre if you're used to plain
old text, but fun, nonetheless. Thanks, whoever did it.

Being me, of course, I wanted to change netscape to Lynx. The 'changing it'
stuff is the url-handler capplet in the control centre. 

For people contemplating similar things, two caveats:

(1) If you want to change it to Lynx (and, I suspect, other text-
based browsers like w3m), then don't simply add a line in there 
saying "lynx "%s"" because Lynx needs a terminal to run in. If it
doesn't have one, I found it goes and starts up on the virtual
console from which I started Gnome with 'startx'. This is not very
useful:) 

What I used was the -e option to gnome-terminal (which runs the command 
following it) and changed the line in the control centre so it said

Protocol	Command
default		gnome-terminal -e 'lynx "%s"'

That works fine. You need the extra single quotes because of the double
quotes. (Erm, that's not very clear, I know. Trust me.)

(2) It only gets picked up from a new terminal!

I give most of my windows titles. I have recently learned what the escape
codes are to change the title from inside the window at the prompt, (and
what a horrid sequence of weirdness they are, too!) but before that, I 
was using the --title option of gnome-terminal when I started one up, and
it's really neat. So I changed that url-handling line above to:

default		gnome-terminal --title Dingus -e 'lynx "%s"'

And clicked on the url in the terminal I was testing things on.

My lynx window started up, but with the title Terminal, which it had
had before. I killed that window, started a new terminal from the
panel thingy you click on, found a url to click on, and this time
it started up with Dingus as the title of the window. 

Hooray!

My comment/question/observation is, basically, does this mean that if
I am sitting merrily on irc or reading email and I see a URL where
someone says, "Look at this graphical site", does this mean that I can't 
just change the default browser in the control centre and then just click
on the url from the terminal I saw the url? ie, that I'd have to change
it in the control centre, and then start a new gnome-terminal in order
for Gnome to notice that it should now use a different browser?

I have now managed to get to the stage where clicking on the same URL
in two gnome-terminals, one started after I made a change to the
title and one started before, produces two different results. The
terminal that was running before the change will dingus-click (is
this really a verb?) to produce lynx running in gnome-terminal with a 
title of Dingus, and the terminal that I started afterwards will
produce a lynx running in a terminal with a title of Dingus Thingus
(ahem). If I cut and paste it from the first to the second, I get
the second one, but that's a bit of a long-winded way round: I might
just as well cut it and paste it to a prompt elsewhere and edit the
line to say netscape in front of it as I used to do.

Anyway, if people are playing with this, and they wonder why something
isn't changing, they might want to start up a new terminal and see
whether it works in that one.

I wasn't sure whether this was a bug or not. It seems to me to be
slightly buggy in that it's not immediate (in the same way that if
I have transparent terminals, I change a windowmaker-controlled theme
and find that the terminals don't notice the theme change, so they're
transparent onto the old theme, not the new one :)). But maybe this
is logical and intuitive. I'm mostly posting this here so that anyone
who plays about with the dingus thinguses and Lynx knows that it
needs a terminal to run in :)

I am now wondering whether I can make ftp links work, too. Two
caveats: I don't like automatically downloading things, so if it's
a directory url that's fine, but if it's a file, it needs to log
in, switch to that directory but not grab the file until I specifically
tell it to. And I have to use passive mode, so that means pftp (yuk),
ncftp (cheer!) or, apparently, gftp (which is unfortunately too big 
for my little 640x480 screen, really). I think this might be a bit 
complicated. Is it possible?

Telsa