As I've mentioned in the past I keep a work-log, or work-diary, recording my activities every day.

I have a bunch of standard things that I record, but one thing that often ends up happening is that I make references to external bug trackers, be they Jira, Bugzilla, or something else.

Today I hacked up a simple emacs minor-mode for converting these references to hyperlinks, automatically, via the use of regular expressions.

Given this configuration:

(setq linkifier-patterns '(
          ("\\\<XXX-[0-9]+\\\>" "https://jira.example.com/browse/%s")
          ("\\\<BUG-[0-9]+\\\>" "https://bugzilla.example.com/show?id=%s")))

When the minor-mode is active the any literal text that matches the pattern, for example "XXX-1234", will suddenly become a clickable button that will open Jira, and BUG-1234 will become a clickable button that opens the appropriate bug in Bugzilla.

There's no rewriting of the content, this is just a bit of magic that changes the display of the text (i.e. I'm using a button/text-property).

Since I mostly write in org-mode I could have written my text like so:

[[jira:XXX-1234][XXX-1234]]

But that feels like an ugly thing to do, and that style of links wouldn't work outside org-files anyway. That said it's a useful approach if you're only using org-mode, and the setup is simple:

(add-to-list 'org-link-abbrev-alist
    '("jira" . "http://jira.example.com/browse/%s"))

Anyway, cute hack. Useful too.

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