urxvt-selection-autotransform - Man Page

This selection allows you to do automatic transforms on a selection whenever a selection is made.

It works by specifying perl snippets (most useful is a single s/// operator) that modify $_ as resources:

   URxvt.selection-autotransform.0: transform
   URxvt.selection-autotransform.1: transform
   ...

For example, the following will transform selections of the form filename:number, often seen in compiler messages, into vi +$filename $word:

   URxvt.selection-autotransform.0: s/^([^:[:space:]]+):(\\d+):?$/vi +$2 \\Q$1\\E\\x0d/

And this example matches the same,but replaces it with vi-commands you can paste directly into your (vi :) editor:

   URxvt.selection-autotransform.0: s/^([^:[:space:]]+(\\d+):?$/:e \\Q$1\\E\\x0d:$2\\x0d/

Of course, this can be modified to suit your needs and your editor :)

To expand the example above to typical perl error messages ("XXX at FILENAME line YYY."), you need a slightly more elaborate solution:

   URxvt.selection.pattern-0: ( at .*? line \\d+[,.])
   URxvt.selection-autotransform.0: s/^ at (.*?) line (\\d+)[,.]$/:e \\Q$1\E\\x0d:$2\\x0d/

The first line tells the selection code to treat the unchanging part of every error message as a selection pattern, and the second line transforms the message into vi commands to load the file.