Question

I’m writing a book. I have a large notes file, with hyperlinks of interest. I’d like to be able to move the cursor over a hyperlink, execute a command, and have the text of the webpage inserted for reading, cutting, and modifying. Ideally, it would only be the readable text rather than the full HTML, but I’ll take what I can get (or what I can wget, if that’s the right shell function).

Surely such a thing has already been put together, but searches for “vim insert text hyperlink” and such are not very helpful. Have you seen this function?

Answer 1

With your mouse cursor on a hyperlink, execute

:rC-rC-aEnter

This will insert the raw contents on the following line.
To preprocess:

:r !links -dumpC-rC-aEnter

Of course, you can map this to a key:

:nnoremap <F6> :r !links -dump <C-r><C-a><CR>

---

Various notes:

If you have quoted urls, you might not be happy about C-rC-a because the quotes will get included. Consider doing

:se iskeyword+=/,:,.

And use C-rC-w instead. Alternatively,

:se isfname-="

allows you to use C-rC-f instead.

If you don’t want to tinker with any of your settings, consider creating a function that saves and restores the value of &iskeyword or &isfname. To bring out the big gun, write a regex for URLs and use that:

func! ReadFromUrl()
    let url = substitute(getline('.'), '\c\v^.*((https?|ftp|file)://[a-z0-9.:/%+()]+).*$', '\1', '')
    exec 'r! links -dump "' . url . '"'
endf

command! ReadFromUrl call ReadFromUrl()
nnoremap! <F6> ReadFromUrl<CR>