From my point of view, I was wondering how Search on Internet worked versus the Launch in Chrome, Launch in Firefox etc shown in the default shortcuts.xml. I had long copied the examples in shortcuts.xml for browser shortcuts. But, I was then forced to modify shortcuts.xml when I switched my default browser. Those examples always explicitly gave a browser (due to Web development). And I followed that convention. Search on Internet followed the default browser.
I first tried searching in the NPP sources. But I can’t read C++ well enough.
I happened on Launch in Web browser · Issue #472 where Mr. Ho simply says “It’s been done.” I wasn’t sure what that could mean and then found the answer I linked to in my original post.
I typically disable clickable links as a first customization. So, it made sense to me that clickable links was the implied solution.
My muscle memory is set to the shortcuts I’ve developed. So, I kept experimenting with the examples in shortcuts.xml until I realized <command /> was just some escaped wrapper for a plain Run prompt. I had previously made the leap to use Start-Process to invoke URLs from the shell. So, I tried directly invoking a URL from NPP and it worked.
I did not realize there had been a recent discussion. My searches had centered around “default Web browser” thus the GitHub issue. I don’t remember seeing this other discussion.
Now, even my PowerShell function has encoding and a fixed protocol. – Since this literally executes whatever is selected, I threw in annoying warnings.