urlview

Extract URLs from a file and display menu

$ urlview [path/to/file]

$ urlview [file1] [file2] [file3]

$ cat [path/to/email.txt] | urlview

$ urlview [path/to/message]

urlview filename [filename...]

urlview is a screen-oriented utility that extracts URLs from text files and displays an interactive menu for launching them in a browser. It scans input using a regular expression to identify URLs and presents a navigable list.
The tool is commonly used with terminal email clients like mutt, allowing users to quickly access links embedded in messages. When a URL is selected from the menu, urlview launches the configured browser or URL handler.
Configuration is read from ~/.urlview or /etc/urlview/system.urlview. The configuration file can specify a custom regular expression for URL extraction (REGEXP), a command to launch URLs (COMMAND), and whether long URLs should wrap (WRAP).
The default handler is url_handler.sh, but the BROWSER environment variable can override this with a browser command or colon-delimited list of browsers to try.

filename

One or more text files to scan for URLs. If no files specified, reads from stdin.

The default URL regular expression may not match all valid URL formats. Complex URLs with special characters may require configuration adjustments. urlview works best with plain text; for emails with MIME encoding, consider urlscan which handles quoted-printable and base64 encodings.

urlview was originally written by Michael Elkins, the creator of the mutt email client, in the late 1990s. It was designed to complement mutt by providing easy URL handling in a terminal environment. The tool has been maintained by various contributors and remains a standard utility for terminal-based email workflows.

urlscan(1), mutt(1), lynx(1), xdg-open(1)