urlscan

Mutt and terminal url selector (similar to urlview)

Command Line

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2Distinct people

2Mentions

1Explicit recommenders

249GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Mutt and terminal url selector (similar to urlview)

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

You all joke that this doesn’t happen in practice, but something like this literally just bit me and it took me a few too many minutes to figure out what was going on. I use a…

HellsMaddy used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by week2 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-03-09 08:48:46 UTC to 2022-08-24 22:34:13 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
Mar 7	2022-03-07 00:00:00 UTC	2022-03-14 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Mar 14	2022-03-14 00:00:00 UTC	2022-03-21 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 21	2022-03-21 00:00:00 UTC	2022-03-28 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 28	2022-03-28 00:00:00 UTC	2022-04-04 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 4	2022-04-04 00:00:00 UTC	2022-04-11 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 11	2022-04-11 00:00:00 UTC	2022-04-18 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 18	2022-04-18 00:00:00 UTC	2022-04-25 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 25	2022-04-25 00:00:00 UTC	2022-05-02 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
May 2	2022-05-02 00:00:00 UTC	2022-05-09 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
May 9	2022-05-09 00:00:00 UTC	2022-05-16 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
May 16	2022-05-16 00:00:00 UTC	2022-05-23 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
May 23	2022-05-23 00:00:00 UTC	2022-05-30 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
May 30	2022-05-30 00:00:00 UTC	2022-06-06 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jun 6	2022-06-06 00:00:00 UTC	2022-06-13 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jun 13	2022-06-13 00:00:00 UTC	2022-06-20 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jun 20	2022-06-20 00:00:00 UTC	2022-06-27 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jun 27	2022-06-27 00:00:00 UTC	2022-07-04 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jul 4	2022-07-04 00:00:00 UTC	2022-07-11 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jul 11	2022-07-11 00:00:00 UTC	2022-07-18 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jul 18	2022-07-18 00:00:00 UTC	2022-07-25 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jul 25	2022-07-25 00:00:00 UTC	2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 1	2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-08-08 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 8	2022-08-08 00:00:00 UTC	2022-08-15 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 15	2022-08-15 00:00:00 UTC	2022-08-22 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 22	2022-08-22 00:00:00 UTC	2022-08-29 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

2 sources

kuon·Aug 24, 2022

Well, e-mail has different uses, I do use mutt and I send plain text email, but I understand sending newsletter with "nice" format in HTML. I am happy that many includes a "view link" I can just open in my browser if I want to read it. I use lynx for html formatting, which works, except with long confirmation link, for this I use urlscan[1] which let me browse and open links. I don't think email must be loved or hated, it's not black and white, it is an old protocol with lots of problems, but it's also the only working federated protocol (and I do operate my own email server with 0 issues, google/ms never rejected me) which is an important freedom. I agree that many client have bad UX, but many have nice UX, and you are free to use what you want, even if you have a gmail account. [1]: https://github.com/firecat53/urlscan

In Email doesn't suck – it's email clients that need improving

HellsMaddy·Mar 9, 2022Recommendation phrase

You all joke that this doesn’t happen in practice, but something like this literally just bit me and it took me a few too many minutes to figure out what was going on. I use a bash script as my BROWSER which calls another bash script to launch or communicate with my browser that I run inside a container. The script that my BROWSER script calls has some debug output that it prints to stderr. I use mutt as my email client and urlscan [0] to open URLs inside emails. Urlscan looks at my BROWSER environment variable and thus calls my script to open whatever URL I target. Some time recently, the urlscan author decided to improve the UX by hiding stderr so that it wouldn’t pollute the view, and so attempted to pipe it to `/dev/null`. I guess their original code to do this wasn’t quite correct and it ended up closing the child processes’ stderr.*

Read the rest

I generally use `set -e` (errexit) because I want my scripts to fail if any command fails (I consider that after an unhandled failure the script’s behavior is undefined, some other people disagree and say you should never use `set -e` outside of development, but I digress). My BROWSER scripts are no exception. While my scripts handle non-zero returns for most things that can go wrong, I never considered that writing log messages to stdout or stderr might fail. But it did, which caused the script to die before it was able to launch my browser. For a few weeks I wasn’t able to use urlscan to open links. I was too lazy to figure out what was wrong, and when I did it took me a while because I looked into every possibility except this one. Luckily this wasn’t a production app. But I know now it could just as feasibly happen in production, too. I opened an issue[1] and it was fixed very quickly. I love open source! *No disrespect to urlscan, it’s an awesome tool and bugs happen to all of us! [0]: https://github.com/firecat53/urlscan [1]: https://github.com/firecat53/urlscan/issues/122

In Bugs in Hello World