Alacritty open links with modifier

note, Jun 25, 2023 on Mitja Felicijan's blog

Alacritty by default makes all links in the terminal output clickable and this -gets annoying rather quickly. I liked the default behavior of Gnome terminal -where you needed to hold Control key and then you could click and open links.

To achieve this in Alacritty you need to provide a hint in the configuration -file. Config file is located at ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml.

hints:
-  enabled:
-  - regex: "(mailto:|gemini:|gopher:|https:|http:|news:|file:|git:|ssh:|ftp:)\
-            [^\u0000-\u001F\u007F-\u009F<>\"\\s{-}\\^⟨⟩`]+"
-    command: xdg-open
-    post_processing: true
-    mouse:
-      enabled: true
-      mods: Control
-

The following should work under any Linux system. For macOS, you will need to -change command: xdg-open to something else.

Now the links will be visible and clickable only when Control key is being -pressed.

Source: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/5246