xdg-direct

xdg-direct was written to deal with the situation where you click on a link, and it opens the browser in the window with the wrong profile. And no, I don't want to click on which profile to open a link in each time.

The way it deals with this is by acting as a glob-based "router" between xdg-open and the browser. It scans the opened url for patterns defined in the config (/etc/xdg-direct.config) and runs the command associated with the url. See the Usage section for examples.

Usage

Let's say you have a Firefox profile called work and the following config file:

# /etc/xdg-direct/config.yaml
default_command: "firefox"
mappings:
  - url: "*.gitlab.org/*"
    cmd: "firefox"
    args:
      - "-P"
      - "work"
debug_mode: false

When running xdg-direct "https://example.gitlab.org/example", a match with *.gitlab.org/* will be found, and the command firefox -P work will be run. The url will automatically be included at the end of the command. When there is no match with any rule, say with https://wikipedia.org, the default command will be run (just firefoxin this case).

Use with xdg-open

The Makefile provides a convenient way to install both the programme and the .desktop application file needed for running it with xdg-open; this can be done by running make alterXdg. When running without make, run the scripts from the Makefile in order in this repo's root directory.

TODO

• add automatic build
• add some unit tests
• verify this works for MacOS