A URL scheme handler that opens hxxp: and hxxps: URLs as http: or https:
Do you have friends who send you URLs, but keep misspelling
http://example.com as hXXp://example.com, or https://example.org as
hxxps://example.org? Never fear, Haxxeptance is here!
Haxxeptance is available for macOS (10.9 or later) and Linux.
Copy the Haxxeptance application to your Mac (the /Applications/Utilities
folder or your ~/Applications folder), and double-click to run it. It
appears to do nothing (the app exits immediately)… but once you've run it,
you can click on links such as hxxps://google.com/, and
those links will open in your default browser as if you had clicked on
https://google.com/!
Haxxeptance declares itself as a handler for the hxxp: and hxxps: URL
schemes. When you run the app once,
Launch Services
takes note of the existence of the app as a handler for those schemes.
Thereafter, whenever you open such a link, Launch Services asks Haxxeptance to
handle your request. Haxxeptance fixes the misspellings in the URLs that it
receives, then asks Launch Services to open the corrected URLs — which are
then handled by your default browser.
Haxxeptance does not stay resident in memory, as it always exits shortly after it starts running.
To stop handling hxxp: and hxxps: URLs, simply move the Haxxeptance
application to the Trash.
The haxxeptance package installs a
desktop entry
that complies with the freedesktop.org specification. In particular, the entry
declares that it accepts the MIME types x-scheme-handler/hxxp and
x-scheme-handler/hxxps to express interest in handling the hxxp: and
hxxps: URL schemes. It also specifies that those URLs are to be opened
using the hxxp-open command, which is a simple shell script that runs the
xdg-open command to
open the rewritten URL using your preferred browser.
This technique should work on any Linux-like desktop environment that complies with the freedesktop.org specifications, including FreeBSD.
I could have written a server-side e-mail filter that performs a search-and-replace on the text, which would be a cross-platform solution. However, that would have several drawbacks:
- Misspelled links can occur in many contexts, not just in the body of an e-mail: a calendar invitation, inside a ZIP archive, etc.
- It would break e-mail signatures, which is bad, because cryptographic signatures are good.
- There might be an e-mail thread that discusses such misspellings, and it would be confusing to read such discussions if all of those misspellings were corrected for you before you could read them. For that matter, altering what other people wrote is a bad idea in general.
I wanted to learn to write code in Swift, and this seemed like a very practical problem to solve that would make my life easier.