Urxvt limits
Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:36:44 +0200
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+

As much as I  was happy to try out Urxvt  and it's perl extensions,
namely matcher, which allows clickable  links in text files, it has
one major fault: the display of utf-8 fonts.

Now this is a problem because 1)  I'm both French and British, so I
need utf-8, and 2) utf-8 icons are cool. I guess if I just used the 
English alphabet I wouldn't care so much.

Anything Urxvt can't  display appears as an ugly  square. I've read
people saying things  like "it's the fault of the  font, try size 4
or 33",  but sorry  that doesn't  wash. Kitty  and Ghostty  have no
problem displaying the same fonts,  even  st  which is a very basic
suckless terminal,  so the problem is Urxvt.  It's a  shame because 
Urxvt  is  a very old but nice snappy virtual terminal. Oh well.

So what about clickable links in other virtual terminals?
Interestingly there's a standard on this called OSC 8:
https://github.com/Alhadis/OSC8-Adoption

It turns out it it works fine in Ghostty:
In ~/.config/ghostty/config add link-url = true

And in Kitty it works out of the box.  However nice to have,this is
a hack,  it doesn't replace clickable  links  in  the browser, also
it doesn't open the link in the same Lynx instance.

So creating a gophermap for every phlog article is how I'm doing it
until some kind soul adds  clickable links in Lynx.  My red face is
because I'm holding my breath, be warned.