Support hyperlink ansi escapes

[sindresorhus]

Terminal emulators are starting to support hyperlinks. While many terminals have long detected URL's and linkified them, allowing you to Command-Click or Control-Click them to open a browser, you were forced to print the long unsightly URL's on the screen. As of spring 2017 a few terminals began supporting HTML like links, where the link text and destination could be specified separately.

Example from iTerm2 3.1:

[mofux]

Good idea, PR welcome!

[chabou]

It could become a standard and make parsing easier.
Related issue: #583

[sindresorhus]

The biggest benefit is that we can linkify text without having to spam the terminal with a long URL. For example, one could link to the documentation in error messages without making it super verbose.

[albinekb]

This should be implemented with care, you need to be able to hover the link to see where it leads, otherwise you could link users unknowingly to malicious sites. This is already a huge problem in email phishing.

For example you could make a link that had the title "login.facebook.com" but actually link it to login.faceboook.com, having a page that looks exactly the same, but saving the users password on login.

[sindresorhus]

iTerm2 shows the URL like this:

This is also similar to how Chrome shows the URL when you hover links.

[jamestalmage]

If / when this is implemented, please submit an issue or PR to supports-hyperlinks, which is intended to detect support for this capability.

[Tyriar]

@jamestalmage this will probably need to be left up to xterm.js embedders, right now the environment is owned by the terminal emulators that use xterm.js. For example Hyper and VS Code each individually set TERM_PROGRAM.

[jamestalmage]

@Tyriar - In that case, perhaps just include a reference to supports-hyperlinks in the commit that lands this, and in the release notes when it goes wide. I'm not sure if there are supports-hyperlinks equivalents for other languages, but if so, probably worth mentioning them as well.