Goto Address Mode Opens Links in Emacs : Random Geekery

Org Mode has this nice thing where you can click a link in the buffer to open it in your browser. Turns out that’s not some special org-only behavior. It’s goto-address-mode, a minor mode that activates URLs and email addresses in the current buffer.

You can manually launch it with M-x goto-address-mode. It might be easier to automatically enable it for certain modes. You do that with a hook.

I want links to be available when reviewing notes and blog posts. Since I write those notes in a number of formats, I should add the hook one of the general major modes. text-mode is a good start.

Code Sample

    ;; base mode for prose
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook (lambda ()
                           (goto-address-mode)))

Now I can open links in Emacs from my Markdown and reStructuredText files with a click! Or a C-c <RET>.

goto-address-mode key bindings

Key	Function	Action
`C-c <RET>`	`goto-address-at-point`	Opens the link under point

I might add the hook for prog-mode later, if I find myself wanting to click URLs in source code.

Backlinks

inv note