Links are not clickable in alacritty/zellij

[ibrahima]

Hi! I recently set up a new Framework 13 with Ubuntu 24.04 and Omakub. I noticed that in Alacritty, links are not clickable. This works fine in gnome-terminal. It also works fine if I start alacritty with a non-existent config file (to simulate no config). It also works if I start zellij inside gnome-terminal. But with the default configuration of Alacritty + zellij, links are just not clickable. I looked around for any posted issues but I didn't find any, which is surprising to me because I'd expect that if this was a common issue someone would have brought it up.

The easiest way to test this is to echo a url, e.g.

echo "https://www.google.com"

I have found this zellij issue but it's been resolved years ago: https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/719

My question is, 1. is this an issue that others are experiencing, and 2. if not, how can I determine what's wrong with my setup such that links are not clickable? Thanks!

[florentdestremau]

It's been asked here #146 , the answer is : you need to hold SHIFT to have text selection and link clicks working

[ibrahima]

Yeah, I noticed that in https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/719 as well but that actually does not work for me for some reason.

[ibrahima]

I am also confused because without shift I do have some form of text selection working, but the highlight color is almost the same as the background color so it's hard to tell. Text I select seems to be automatically copied when that happens. When I hold shift, the highlight is much more visible, but I don't know what the difference is.

Without shift - you can perhaps very barely see that the text starting from "The peach" until "education." is selected.

Zoomed in it's slightly more visible

With shift it's much clearer

[ibrahima]

Oh, I think the very subtle selection background is from Zellij's mouse mode itself. When I copy text that way I don't get the window pane borders. I wonder if that somehow interferes with the link clicking in Alacritty?

[ShallmentMo]

I just make the pane large enough to ignore the border from zellij. Have to copy the link and open it by myself

[ibrahima]

Hmm, so you're also not able to click links without copying them? That's somewhat reassuring... Though given that I set up this laptop from scratch a couple weeks ago it seems very unlikely that it's anything I did anyway. But personally I'd rather have working links than the mouse integration in zellij... So yeah idk I need to try disabling that and see if it helps.

[ibrahima]

I just realized that if I use ctrl + shift I can click on links. But I think that's due to something I tweaked in my Alacritty.toml. Without that it does work out of the box if I hold shift, but because I didn't know about that I tried to add something to my Alacritty config to open links when Ctrl is pressed.

Either way though the link parsing doesn't seem fully zellij-aware, so if a link is wrapped around a pane border it won't get the full URL 😢. I guess that's a zellij issue: https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/3436

To be honest, I've never personally felt that Gnome Terminal was too slow, and I don't use zellij's capabilities much, so for me it might make more sense to just go back to Gnome Terminal instead of Alacritty for now.