Re-implements netrw's gx command with a call to xdg-open (or a similar tool of your choosing). You can also use gX to always open a path as an URL (so that e.g. example.com/path opens http://example.com/path, rather than a local path).

This is especially useful if you're using dirvish or some other file-manager other than netrw.

Is this fully compatible with netrw?

It should be for most purposes, but feature-for-feature (or bug-for-bug) compatibility was not a goal. Notable changes are:

• Just try to run xdg-open (or another command of your choosing); no complicated fallbacks if it fails.

• The default is to get the <cWORD> instead of <cfile>. This works better for URLs with query parameters. Also allow using an expression to get the text.

• The command is run in the background as a job, which is much more convenient and allows displaying an error only if the command fails.

Can I disable netrw completely?

• To only disable gx-related functionality:

  let g:netrw_nogx = 1

• To disable all of netrw:

  let g:loaded_netrw = 1

• To disable the netrw doc files you need to remove the doc file at $VIMRUNTIME/doc/pi_netrw.txt and rebuild the help tags with:

  :helptags $VIMRUNTIME/doc

  This has the advantage of not cluttering :helpgrep or tab completion.

  You will need write permissions here (e.g. run it as root). Unfortunately you will need to re-run this after every upgrade.

See :help xdg_open for the full documentation.