Skip to main content

Clickable Terminal Links

· 3 min read
Erik Osterman
Erik Osterman
Founder @ Cloud Posse

When a CLI needs you to open a page in a browser, it usually prints a URL and leaves the rest to you: select it, copy it, paste it. Sign-in URLs make that painful. They're full of tokens, they often run to hundreds of characters, and they wrap across the screen. Atmos can now deliver those links the way your terminal handles best: as a short clickable link, as a copy on your clipboard, or as the plain URL.

The Problem​

Several Atmos commands hand you a URL to open yourself. atmos auth login shows the AWS sign-in URL in case the browser doesn't open, and atmos auth console shows a console sign-in URL when it doesn't launch a browser. AWS IAM Identity Center URLs now exceed 500 characters, and console sign-in URLs carry a full session token. Printing the raw URL was the only option, even though most modern terminals can show a short label as a clickable hyperlink and every desktop has a clipboard.

The Fix​

A new settings.terminal.links option controls how Atmos delivers these links:

  • auto (default): a short clickable link, such as "Open AWS sign-in", when your terminal is known to support hyperlinks. Otherwise, the plain URL.
  • osc8: always the clickable link. Use this when your terminal supports hyperlinks but Atmos can't tell, which is common inside a container or over SSH.
  • clipboard: copy the URL straight to your clipboard. If no clipboard is reachable, Atmos asks the terminal to copy it and also prints the URL.
  • raw: always the plain URL.

In auto mode, Atmos recognizes iTerm2, VS Code, WezTerm, Ghostty, kitty, Windows Terminal, GNOME Terminal and other VTE-based terminals, Konsole, and Orca. Inside tmux or screen, or anywhere it can't identify the terminal, it falls back to the plain URL. When output isn't a terminal, such as in CI or when piped, Atmos always prints the plain URL and never touches the clipboard. Atmos also honors the FORCE_HYPERLINK convention other command-line tools use: 1 forces the clickable link and 0 turns it off.

The AWS sign-in prompts are tidier too. A URL that fits in 80 columns stays inside the prompt's box. A longer one is delivered below the box, so the border no longer wraps into the URL or ends up in the text you copy.

How to Use It​

Most people don't need to change anything: auto already gives you a clickable link in a supported terminal.

To pick a mode for your project, set it in atmos.yaml:

settings:
  terminal:
    links: clipboard   # auto, osc8, clipboard, or raw

To override it for a shell session or a single command, use the ATMOS_TERMINAL_LINKS environment variable or the --links global flag:

export ATMOS_TERMINAL_LINKS=osc8
atmos auth console --no-open --links=clipboard

The flag takes precedence over the environment variable, which takes precedence over atmos.yaml.

Get Involved​

If your terminal supports hyperlinks but auto doesn't recognize it, let us know in GitHub Issues so we can add it.