Overview

Context-sensitive external browse URL or Internet search from Emacs.

Quickstart

(require 'browse-url-dwim)
 
(browse-url-dwim-mode 1)
 
;; place the cursor on a URL
;; press "C-c b"
 
;; select some text
;; press "C-c g"
 
;; to turn off confirmations
(setq browse-url-dwim-always-confirm-extraction nil)

Explanation

This small library for calling external browsers combines some of the functionality of browse-url and thingatpt.

Three interactive commands are provided:

browse-url-dwim
browse-url-dwim-search
browse-url-dwim-guess

each of which tries to extract URLs or meaningful terms from context in the current buffer, and prompts for input when unable to do so.

The context-sensitive matching of browse-url-dwim tries to do less overall than the default behavior of thingatpt, on the theory that thingatpt matches too liberally. However, browse-url-dwim does recognize some URLs that the default browse-url ignores, such as "www.yahoo.com" without the leading "http://".

To use browse-url-dwim, add the following to your ~/.emacs file

(require 'browse-url-dwim)      ; load library
(browse-url-dwim-mode 1)        ; install aliases and keybindings

Then place the cursor on a URL and press

C-c b                           ; b for browse

or select some text and press

C-c g                           ; g for Google

or (equivalently)

M-x browse RET
M-x google RET

Outside the USA

If you are outside the USA, you will want to customize browse-url-dwim-permitted-tlds so that your favorite top-level domains will be recognized in context. You may also wish to customize browse-url-dwim-search-url to point at an appropriate search engine.

Notes

To control which browser is invoked, see the underlying library browse-url.

By default, the minor mode binds and aliases browse-url-dwim-guess, for Internet search, but the user might prefer to bind browse-url-dwim-search, which has less DWIM:

(define-key browse-url-dwim-map (kbd "C-c g") 'browse-url-dwim-search)

Compatibility and Requirements

GNU Emacs version 24.4-devel     : yes, at the time of writing
GNU Emacs version 24.3           : yes
GNU Emacs version 23.3           : yes
GNU Emacs version 22.2           : yes, with some limitations
GNU Emacs version 21.x and lower : unknown

Uses if present: string-utils.el