When you click an email address, it automatically opens in your email client. But I don’t have an email client, I use webmail. I wrote a custom handler for Linux.
First write a program to open mailto links. Mailto links look like “mailto:me@mail.com” or maybe even “mailto:me@mail.com?subject=mysubject&body=mybody“. Test it by hand on a few links. Mine (mailto-opener) composes a new message using my webmail.
Next, write a desktop file for the opener. Here’s one:
#/usr/local/share/applications/mailto-opener.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=mailto: link opener (github.com/za3k/short-programs)
# The executable of the application, possibly with arguments.
Exec=/home/zachary/.projects/short-programs/mailto-opener %u
Note the %u in the Exec= line. That’s required.
Now update your system mimetype database. On my Arch Linux install, I run
xdg-mime default mailto-opener.desktop x-scheme-handler/mailto
Finally, restart your browser. Really. Firefox and Chromium/Chrome both cache mimetype openers.
A related opener I added recently was for magnet links, such as are popularly used for bittorrent.
~ $ cat /usr/local/share/applications/transmission-remote.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=transmission-remote magnet link opener
Exec=transmission-remote <TRANSMISSION INSTANCE> -a
transmission-remote is the name of a command-line Linux program. It connects to an instance of Tranmission (a popular torrent client) running on another machine.