How to get Emacs to display file in browser instead of emacs itself

Question

Consider the following link I have in my org-mode file

[[file:./helloworld.py][LinkToFile]]

Emacs always opens source code files inside emacs. Web-links on the other hand are always opened in the browser. How can I get such source code files to be displayed in the browser instead?

Answer 1

You can do this with a custom link type, as described here.

The following code minimally does this for your case:

;; a function to open files in the browser:
(defun my-browse-file (path)
  (browse-url
  (concat "file:" path)))

;; add the new link type
(org-add-link-type "hfile" 'my-browse-file)

With this, you can use links in this format:

[[hfile:///home/tws/scratch][my file]]

I think you need to use the absolute path to your file, I don't think you can use relative paths. At least, not when you pass the path to the browser as file:///path/to/file, as is done here. You could alter my-browse-file to insert the /// for you, so your links can skip that bit.