I'd like to bring a cool new feature to your attention.

GNOME Terminal and iTerm2 now support explicit hyperlinks (just like HTML anchors) where the target URL is specified independently from the visible text.

A couple of possible uses for this feature:

• Autodetect URLs appearing in messages, and surrounding them with such escape sequences. This way web links would keep working (e.g. easily openable with a Ctrl+click) if partially scrolled out of the window, if wrapped in multiple lines (maybe within a vertical split), etc.

• As pointed out at the top of this post, HTML messages received over XMPP (e.g. Hipchat) might be formatted much nicer, without wasting screen real estate for actual URL. (Ignore the rest of that post with the escape sequence proposal, that's not what got implemented.)

I'm not really an IRC guy (have used Irssi occasionally), so this is not a concrete feature request here, rather an FYI to think about possible improvements to Irssi enabled by this feature :)

See the details about this new feature here.