Re: shortest amount of keystrokes to see URL in an external browser

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On Sun, Jun 19 2011, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:

> Let's say you are viewing or editing file.txt and there is a URL
> http://example.org/ that you would like to visit in an external browser.
> Well with FFAP installed, C-x C-f upon it would get you there in an
> internal browser, but if one wants to see it in an external browser, a
> lot more work will be involved. C-u C-x C-f of course does something
> different. Note I am talking about .txt files, and not mail messages
> like these, where one could use M runs the command browse-url-firefox
> etc. At least with my http://jidanni.org/comp/configuration/ .

You've got browse-url-browser-function set to 'w3m-browse-url, and while
that's the case you'll have to do something special to use firefox. If
you only want to use an external browser for .txt files, I suppose you
could use a mode-hook to make browse-url-browser-function buffer local
and set it to browse-url-firefox.

I prefer to set browse-url-browser-function to a list of
regexps/functions. Then the top regexp does this:

"https?:" -> (browse-url-generic) -> browse-url-generic-program ->
"google-chrome".

If you were able to dispatch to an external browser on regexps, that
would make the whole thing simpler. Otherwise, making
browse-url-generic-program buffer local and setting it through hooks
might be less disruptive than re-setting browse-url-browser-function to
a completely new function.

Perhaps you knew all this already…

Eric