OSC 8 adoption in terminal emulators

This document tracks in-the-wild support for terminal hyperlinks (a.k.a., OSC 8), primarily amongst terminal emulators.

Testing support

To determine if your terminal emulator supports hyperlinks, run the following command:

printf '\033]8;;http://example.com\033\\This is a link\033]8;;\033\\\n'

In an OSC 8-compatible terminal, you should see something to the effect of:

This is a link

Support

Terminal emulators

• Alacritty since v0.11 (2022-10-13)
• DomTerm since 1.0.2 (2018-05-09)
• foot: Since 1.7.0 (2021-03-20)
• hterm since 1.76 (2018-06-21)
• Hyper since Oct 2019
• iTerm2 3.1
• Kitty since v0.19: issue
• Konsole since Jul 2020
• mintty since 2.9.7 (2019-03-15)
• Terminology in Git since 2018-10-14, probably will be released in version 1.3
• Ultimate++ terminal widget since Nov 2019
• VTE-based: since 0.50¹
  • GNOME Terminal 3.26
  • Guake 3.2.1
  • ROXTerm 3.5.1
  • Terminator²: since v2.0 (2020-10-07)
  • Tilix 1.5.8
  • xfce4-terminal Staged for v1.2 release on 2022-11-07
• WezTerm since early 2018
• Windows Terminal since v1.4.3141.0 (2020-11-12)
• xterm.js since 5.0.0 (2022-09-16)

Terminal multiplexers

• TermySequence
• tmux: since v3.4³

Apps

• Neovim: latest version supports rendering texts with hyperlinks (since this PR).
• Emacs: Since 28.1 (2022-04-04)
• eza: (successor to exa): Since version v0.10.3 (2023-07-31)
• GCC: Since version 10 (and greatly expanded in version 14), for diagnostic messages to point to the documentation.
• Delta: Since v0.4 (2020-08-04), for linking to files and GitHub commits
• groff: Since 1.23.0 (2023-07-05), for links in roff documents, including man pages.
• less -R: since v566 (2020-11-25)
• ls --hyperlink[=always/auto/never]: since coreutils v8.28 (2017-09-02).
• lsd --hyperlink[=always/auto/never]: since lsd 0.22 (2022-04).
• Matterhorn chat client: Since version 40400.0.0.
• mdcat (markdown cat): Since version 0.5.0.
• moar (pager, less replacement): Since version v1.14.0 (2023-05-03)
• Symfony: Since version 4.3.
• systemd: Since version 239.
• wget2: Since Nov 2019

Libraries

• ansi_up ANSI code-to-HTML conversion library: Since v4.0.3 (2019-02-12)
• brick high-level terminal UI library: Since October 2017.
• Rich rich-text formatting library: Since May 2020.
• vty medium-level terminal UI library: Since October 2017.

Pending feature requests

Terminal emulators

• ConEmu
• VTE-based:
  • LilyTerm
  • LXDE Terminal
  • MATE Terminal
  • Tilda

Terminal multiplexers

• screen

Apps

• Irssi
• TBVaccine
• WeeChat

Links

• Original OSC 8 specification
• GNOME Terminal discussion
• iTerm2 discussion
• Test file

Footnotes

1. Use VTE 0.50.4, 0.52.2, or newer to avoid a rare crash. ↩

2. Refers to the "Terminator" program written in Python for Linux, based on GTK+. Not to be confused with the one written in Java bearing the same name. ↩

3. Requires user to add set -ga terminal-features "*:hyperlinks" to their tmux config ↩