Neovim opening URLs

Vim has built-in functionality to open URLs directly by executing gx in normal mode. This functionality is provided by netrw plugin :h netrw-gx

However, in MacOS this functionality is buggy or don’t work at all, see Related BUG. Furthermore, if you’re using different from netrw file browser(for example I use nvim-tree), there’s a good chance that whole netrw plugin is explicitly disabled.

But you can reproduce gx functionality pretty easy(I’ll show the pure Lua version as I’m using Neovim):

local map = require('utils').map

-- URL handling
if vim.fn.has("mac") == 1 then
  map[''].gx = {'<Cmd>call jobstart(["open", expand("<cfile>")], {"detach": v:true})<CR>'}
elseif vim.fn.has("unix") == 1 then
  map[''].gx = {'<Cmd>call jobstart(["xdg-open", expand("<cfile>")], {"detach": v:true})<CR>'}
else
  map[''].gx = {'<Cmd>lua print("Error: gx is not supported on this OS!")<CR>'}
end

Kudos for original solution to nanotee, and find Lua mapping function in Nanotee dotfiles