Feature: add link actions to context menu

[dbalders]

What Changed

Added 2 new link-specific elements in the context menu when right-clicking a link in chat:

• Open Link
• Copy Link Address

Image:

This was part of the request from #677. I confirmed that the main issue for #677 of links not working on Windows was resolved previously by #599, but added the quality of life improvement of the extra attributes to the context menu.

Added an if statement to the context menu event to check if what is being right clicked on is a link or not, and if so, add the 2 elements and a separator. This required adding 'clipboard' to the electron import as well.

Why

This makes link behavior more closely resemble standard UX.

UI Changes

This is a UI change specifically.

Before:

After:

Checklist

• This PR is small and focused
• I explained what changed and why
• I included before/after screenshots for any UI changes

Note

Add 'Open Link' and 'Copy Link Address' entries to the desktop context menu

When right-clicking a link in the desktop app, two new items appear in the context menu: 'Open Link' (opens via shell.openExternal) and 'Copy Link Address' (writes to clipboard). Both items are only shown when getSafeExternalUrl returns a valid URL, followed by a separator before the standard edit items.

^{Macroscope summarized 956c18d.}

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Adds link-specific actions to the Electron desktop app’s custom context menu so users can open/copy URLs when right-clicking links in chat, aligning behavior with common desktop UX.

Changes:

• Add clipboard to Electron imports in the desktop main process.
• Extend the webContents "context-menu" handler to detect safe link URLs and add “Open Link” / “Copy Link Address” menu items.

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[Copilot]

shell.openExternal(externalUrl) returns a Promise and can reject; using void here can lead to an unhandled rejection in the main process if opening the URL fails. Consider handling the rejection (e.g., attach a .catch(...) to log/ignore) similar to the try/catch used in the OPEN_EXTERNAL IPC handler.

[Copilot]

For "Copy Link Address", copying externalUrl (derived from new URL(...).toString()) can normalize the string (e.g., add a trailing slash, re-encode characters), so users may not get the exact link they clicked. Consider copying params.linkURL for fidelity while still using externalUrl for the safe "Open Link" action.

Suggested change

	{ label: "Copy Link Address", click: () => clipboard.writeText(externalUrl) },
	{
	label: "Copy Link Address",
	click: () => clipboard.writeText(params.linkURL || externalUrl),
	},

[juliusmarminge]

don't think this should be shell.openExternal as that opens it on the host machine. if you run the server on a separate server from the frontend, i'd expect clikcing the link to open it on the current machien, not the host

[dbalders]

Thanks @juliusmarminge. I've been looking into this. This is what codex said:

Keep shell.openExternal here.

In Electron, this code runs in the desktop app main process, so shell.openExternal opens on the same machine running the app, not a remote t3 server: [apps/desktop/src/main.ts (line 1177)](app://-/index.html?hostId=local#).
The browser/web path already opens links client-side with window.open(...), which is exactly what you want when frontend and backend are separated: [apps/web/src/wsNativeApi.ts (line 149)](app://-/index.html?hostId=local#).

I tried it when accessing it via the browser to a remote server and it opened links as expected in the browser:

t3test.mov

But, I'm trying to figure out how to check it from the actual app with a different server. Is there a way to hook the electron app itself into a remote server? Will look into that more tomorrow morning as codex seemed to think thats not possible without editing the codebase. Thanks