Open browser based off of certain rules (like choosy for macOS)

choosy

#!/bin/bash

URL=$1
DOMAIN=$(echo "$URL" | awk -F[/:] '{print $4}')

## Domain starts with
if [[ $DOMAIN =~ $(echo ^\($(paste -sd'|' /home/your-user/.config/url-start.txt)\)$) ]]; then
    microsoft-edge "$URL" & disown
elif [[ $DOMAIN =~ $(echo ^\($(paste -sd'|' /home/your-user/.config/url-is.txt)\)$) ]]; then
    microsoft-edge "$URL" & disown
else
    firefox "$URL" & disown
fi

choosy.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Choosy
GenericName=Browser Chooser
Comment=Choose what browser to use for specific links
Categories=Network;
Exec=choosy %u
Type=Application
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/unknown;x-scheme-handler/about;text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml_xml;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;

url-is.txt

url-start.txt

localhost

This script allows one to set which browser handles which uri. This gist is forked from the work of @cesarolea and is here as reference for me and others. These instructions were tested on Ubuntu 22.04.
There are 2 files filtering the urls:

• url-start.txt there are the urls which are handled if there is a partial match e.g. if here we set the uri docs.google.com, then also https://docs.google.com/user/davide/blablabla.docx will be handled by the selected browser
• url-is.txt here the urls are matched only exactly

Installation

1. Modify the file choosy, replacing your-user with your username
2. Select which browser handles which case by editing the file choosy (in my example here I have microsoft edge handling the two filtered cases and firefox handling all other urls
3. Copy choosy to your path and make it executable

cp choosy ~/bin/
chmod +x ~/bin/choosy

4. Copy choosy.desktop to either ~/.local/share/applications/ or /usr/share/applications/:
   cp choosy.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
5. Execute xdg-mime default choosy.desktop x-scheme-handler/http && xdg-mime default choosy.desktop x-scheme-handler/https in the terminal to set the association.
6. Copy both url-start.txt and url-is.txt to your ~/.config folder:
   cp url-* ~/.config