urlscan and urlview: With the assist

Not having a lot of experience with the convenience and immediacy of local mail service, I find that things like urlscan and urlview are sometimes lost on me.

I’ve done my best though, to try and see the fearful symmetry of urlview, which skims through text files and plucks out viable URLs, then displays them as links. How would that be useful? When sent an e-mail filled with links, of course.

From there, it’s a simple hop-skip-and-jump to your fav-o-rite browser, and you can wallow at your leisure in the murky swill of the Internet.

And it’s got most of the requisite points — some color, a full-screen interface, abort keys on screen. Granted, it’s simple, but not so simple as to be unnoticed.

urlscan is a re-imagining of the task, and is written in python. You can probably see the resemblance.

And you can see where there’s a slight variation on the original theme, with a top-and-bottom arrangement over urlview’s list-and-status bar style. You pick your preference.

(I did notice, just as a side note, that urlscan seemed to glance over URLs that were prefixed with http:// but that may have been a quirk in my test list.)

Other notes: urlview has a complete configuration file in /etc/urlview/. urlscan can dump its ouput to STDOUT. Both expect you to configure $BROWSER beforehand, although I believe urlview can rely on its own configuration files too. Both are in Debian and Arch/AUR.

I feel obligated to mention that both urlview and urlscan are quite happy working their magic on plain text files, and don’t rely on any mail system whatsoever to work (which should be obvious from my screenshots). So if you have a project that needs to skim for web addresses, either will probably suffice.

On the other hand, I can’t really think of many ways to use either program beyond what they’re designed for — filtering through e-mails and displaying links. Perhaps in time I will find something to use them with. … 😉