Open URL under cursor in Vim with browser

Updated: from tpope’s tweet today

Press gx. You can customize the browser. On Gnome and Mac OS X it’s already use gnome-open/open. Generally you can set g:netrw_browsex_viewer to anything you want.

Original answer:

Don’t remember where I get this function. There is a bug with hash (#) in the url, but the function works well enough that I won’t bother fixing it.

function! HandleURL()
  let s:uri = matchstr(getline("."), '[a-z]*:\/\/[^ >,;]*')
  echo s:uri
  if s:uri != ""
    silent exec "!open '".s:uri."'"
  else
    echo "No URI found in line."
  endif
endfunction
map <leader>u :call HandleURL()<cr>

Note: If you are not on the Mac, use gnome-open/xdg-open for Linux, or ‘path to your web browser’ for Windows