14 XMPP URIs

Many web page authors use links starting with ‘xmpp:’ for JIDs. Your web browser could be made to pass such links to jabber.el, so that such links are actually useful and not just decoration. How to do that depends on your operating system and web browser.

For any of these methods, you need to make sure that you are running the Emacs server. See Using Emacs as a Server, though the simplest way to start it is to customize the variable server-mode.

14.1 GNOME

The jabber.el distribution contains a GConf schema which tries to set up handling of ‘xmpp:’ URIs. It is installed by ‘make install’. This may or may not work, depending on your GConf configuration and other installed applications. To check, try running:

     gconftool --get /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/xmpp/command

This should print something like:

     /usr/local/libexec/emacs-jabber-uri-handler "%s"

This setting is picked up by most GNOME or GTK based web browsers, including Firefox.

14.2 Mozilla and Unix

If you use a Mozilla-based web browser on a Unix-like operating system, and the GConf method above doesn't work, you can set it up manually by following these steps:

1. Note the path of the emacs-jabber-uri-handler file in the jabber.el distribution, and make sure it is executable.
2. Set the Mozilla preference ‘network.protocol-handler.app.xmpp’ to the path of emacs-jabber-uri-handler. There are two ways to do this:
   • Go to the URL ‘about:config’, right-click in the list, choose “New string”, and enter ‘network.protocol-handler.app.xmpp’ and the path in the following dialogs.
   • Open or create the file user.js in your Mozilla profile directory (in the same directory as prefs.js), and add the following line:

                    user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.xmpp",
                      "/path/to/emacs-jabber-uri-handler");
     

     Restart Mozilla for this change to take effect.

14.3 Other systems

If you know how to pass an XMPP URI from your browser to the function jabber-handle-uri, your contribution for this section would be appreciated.