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Since releasing Rich 1.0.0 I've discovered that terminals support hyperlinks. And I don't mean the helpful highlighting of URLs that most terminals do, I mean actual HTML-like hyperlinks that launch a browser.

This was news to me, as I've never seen this feature in the wild. I just had to add it to Rich. The easiest way to output hyperlinks is via console markup. Here's a simple example:

This will output the text "Visit my blog!" in the terminal where the word "blog" is a clickable link that opens the browser.

This is a relatively new (2017) addition to the spec, so it isn't supported on all terminal apps. If your terminal doesn't support hyperlinks then the link won't be clickable, but you will see the text as normal.

I've had a blog on my vanity domain for nearly a decade now. For the last 6 years, it has been powered by Django Techblog, which I wrote out of my frustration with syntax highlighting plugins in Wordpress. Techblog has happily served my blog those 6 years, with only minor hiccups when I half-heartedly ported the code to the latest Django.

There was nothing terribly wrong with Django Techblog; it had multiple blogs, tags, search etc., but there were some annoyances that I didn't have the motivation to do much about. The custom markup system I used was clever, but I would often forget the syntax! The support for images was rudimentary and the single-threaded comment system wouldn't notify me of replies. continue reading…