Pass URLs to browser on another machine

[Yeechang Lee]

In the spirit of the new year and the thread lamenting the lack of
alt.hackers posts, here is one minor contribution.

I have been using the same email (VM under Emacs) and news (slrn)
readers for more than 15 years. For most of those years they have run
on a machine that I access via some form of remote, text-only
connection, with everything else running locally. This complicates
passing URLs found in email messages or Usenet postings to a local Web
browser. I could use copy and paste, of course, but where's the fun in
that?

In ~/.slrnrc I have

set Xbrowser "firefox '%s' &"
set non_Xbrowser "openurl '%s'"

and in ~/.vm I have

(setq vm-url-browser "openurl")
(if (eq window-system 'x)
(setq vm-url-browser browse-url-browser-function)
)

(The if function means that, if I by chance am logged directly into
the machine VM and slrn run on, or otherwise have an X display
available, VM instead passes the URL to Emacs' built-in URL handler,
and in turn to the in-line W3M browser.)

'openurl' is the following shell script:

#!/bin/bash
(ssh notebook open $1) || links $1

'notebook' is my MacBook Pro. The script executes via SSH keys on the
MacBook the OS X 'open' command which, among other things, hands URLs
off to the default system browser. If the command fails because I am
away from home and the MacBook is asleep, links displays the URL
instead in the terminal window. This only works with slrn; I have not
yet tried to write the necessary code so that VM will gracefully
process the URL with W3M if openurl fails.

--
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~ylee/> PERTH ----> *