3.1.1 Hyperlinks

Text output may contain hyperlinks. These hyperlinks are encoded through an escape sequence, specified at Hyperlinks in terminal emulators. Currently (as of 2024), they are displayed in many modern terminals, see OSC8-Adoption. More terminal emulators will support hyperlinks in the future. Terminal emulators which don’t support hyperlinks ignore it, except for a few terminal emulators, for which users may need to disable the hyperlinks (see The environment variable NO_TERM_HYPERLINKS) if the heuristic built into libtextstyle does not already disable them.

To emit a hyperlink, use code like this:

  styled_ostream_t stream = ...
  ...
  /* Start a hyperlink.  */
  styled_ostream_set_hyperlink (stream, url, NULL);
  ...
  /* Emit the anchor text.  This can be styled text.  */
  ostream_write_str (stream, "Click here!");
  ...
  /* End the current hyperlink.  */
  styled_ostream_set_hyperlink (stream, NULL, NULL);

The anchor text can be styled. But the hyperlinks themselves cannot be styled; they behave as implemented by the terminal emulator.