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Is it possible to disable hyperlinks in gnome-terminal? The terminal should never underline any text, and clicks should always start selecting.

There are two reasons why I want to do this: First, I simply click into a terminal window when it's at the back without looking what's in the terminal, and often accidentally click a hyperlink that's there. Second, when using npm, there will be lots of text that look like e-mail addresses, but which aren't, e.g. [email protected].

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  • You mean gconf-editor? I tried that, but didn't find the option. OK, maybe I'll try a different terminal emulator.
    – digory doo
    Sep 8, 2015 at 6:31
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    No, Ubuntu now uses dconf-editor. The gconf-editor is mostly deprecated on newer releases.
    – user37165
    Sep 8, 2015 at 6:34
  • Really? Good to know...
    – digory doo
    Sep 8, 2015 at 9:02

2 Answers 2

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+50

Unfortunately gnome-terminal offers no configuration option to disable these. You might want to recompile it, removing the entries from url_regex_patterns in src/terminal-screen.c.

This hyperlink feature doesn't influence the normal text selection by mouse, you can still click and select the text. Clicking on a hyperlink to bring the window forward shouldn't have any undesired side effect. (The feature influences the rarely used rectangular selection (Ctrl+Click becomes "open link" instead), and populates the right-click menu with extra entries.)

Of course, I understand that underlining the text and changing the mouse pointer shape on hover is visually unpleasant when you have many false matches, but I don't see how it causes an actual behavioral problem.


Update:

gnome-terminal version 3.18.3 reimplements the matcher regular expressions from scratch, in a way that leads to much fewer false positives than in preceding versions. E.g. "[email protected]" is no longer treated as a valid e-mail address.

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  • Any idea if it can be configured to allow clicking on file:///... paths with spaces? The usual strategies (quotes, escaping) don't seem to work, i.e. whatever I do, I can't get a file:///... url to ctrl+click-open properly because the term only recognises the part of the path up to the first space. Feb 4, 2018 at 22:03
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    Space is not an allowed character in URIs, use %20 instead. If you expect file:// followed by a literal (unencoded) filename to work, you'll have troubles with plenty of other characters too. Also if we made a special case and allowed spaces, I guess your next problem would be that it includes the rest of the line/paragraph and doesn't stop at that other space... so it would need to read your mind, or at least check for the existence of the file by stopping at various space characters... no.
    – egmont
    Feb 4, 2018 at 22:09
  • This just goes to show that no conclusion is too obvious to miss when you come at it from a weird enough angle: thanks for the %20 remark, that did it! Feb 4, 2018 at 22:42
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Actually, It works as you need in Ubuntu 14.04 (gnome-terminal 3.6) and in Ubuntu 15.04 (gnome-terminal 3.14)

Links activated only with:

  • a Left Click while holding Ctrl
  • or using Right Click → Open Link.

Double Click makes selection.

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  • 1
    Nice workaround, although I hoped I could just turn the whole feature off.
    – digory doo
    Sep 14, 2015 at 14:03
  • @digorydoo , which release do you have?
    – user.dz
    Sep 14, 2015 at 14:20
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    It's Ubuntu 14.04.
    – digory doo
    Sep 16, 2015 at 14:07

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