br

Simple tool to send a URL to your default browser -- it works from within SSH sessions too!

Backgroud

My life as a developer is a mess: at work I have a laptop with Windows 7 and Cygwin installed; I also have a Vagrant box, running Ubuntu, that I use to do the most of my development work. At home I have a Macbook Air, with Mac OS Sierra.

I have been a Vim user for years, but only recently I discovered the :Gbrowse command from the awesome vim-fugitive -- but of course it wasn't working from within a remote session as which browser should it try to open the URL with?

Wouldn't it be nice if I could read from the OS clipboard, or write to it, using a single command line tool? And wouldn't it awesome if the same tool worked on various operating systems? (at least the ones I use on a daily basis)

I had already built cb in the past, so I thought maybe I can re-use some if it and build something that would make :Gbrowse work fine, even when working remotely.

enters br..

Installation

Clone the repo, and run make install:

mkdir -p ~/opt/
cd ~/opt
git clone https://github.com/iamFIREcracker/br.git
cd br
PREFIX=~/local/bin make install

Usage

Opening a URL from the command-line is as simple as:

> br https://google.com

Fucking A...but haven't open, cygstart, xdg-open been doing this for like, years? Correct, and from this point of view, br is just a wrapper that based on the OS would call the right command. However, this is not the reason why br was born; the following is:

> br --listen

This will start a daemon, listening on port 5557 (it's the default, but you can change it by overriding the BR_REMOTE_PORT env variable) for commands to open a given URL with the default browser. You might wonder: what's so good about it? Well, you can run it on your host machine (ie. the one with a OS clipboard), change the ssh commands you use to log into your remote dev boxes to do some port forwarding magic:

> ssh -R 5557:localhost:5557 devbox ...

And that's it, running br https://google.com from the remote host (well, you will have to get br installed there too..) will now get the specified URL opened in the default browser on the host machine.

Git integration

Want git web--browse to run br? Add the following to your .gitconfig:

[web]
    browser = br

[browser "br"]
    cmd = br

Vim integration

Adding the following to your .vimrc, to get <leader>O to send to br the selected text (you better select a URL):

function! g:FuckingOpenTheUrlPlease()
    let view = winsaveview()
    let old_z = @z
    normal! gv"zy
    let url = @z
    echom url
    call system('br '.url)
    let @z = old_z
    call winrestview(view)
endfunction

vnoremap <leader>O :<c-u>call g:FuckingOpenTheUrlPlease()<cr>

While the following sets the default netrw browser command to be br -- finally :Gbrowse will start behaving again, even inside remote sessions:

let g:netrw_browsex_viewer = "br"