Description

Using a work laptop and keeping work and personal workflows is a problem. Chromer is a little helper to open URLs in Google Chrome browser in specific profile based on pattern matching the URL. Preliminary support for Firefox is added. Defaults to Safari browser when no browser is provided in profile.

This is a Mac OS specific solution but can easily be extended to any other platform. The Mac OS specifics are the round-about approach in getting the clicked URL on Mac.

You create a config file and specify the profile and patterns to match. Chromer takes care of the rest. Chromer can handler 'http', 'https' and 'file' URL schemes.

Getting it running

Build & Installation

• Build Chromer (will provide a pre-built version soon) by checking out this repository and make (Needs Go, Xcode + MacOS SDK)
• make install
• Assuming everything goes fine, you should find '/Applications/Chromer.app' and a small icon in the Mac dock
• Go to 'System Preferences', 'General' and 'Default Web Browser' drop down. Select 'Chromer' as the default browser.
  • Incase you do not see chromer in the list of browsers, use a helper app to set default browser from home-brew
    1. brew install defaultbrowser
    2. defaultbrowser chromer

TODO

• Add an event listener to handler application quite event. My Objective-C skills are non-existent, will take time

Bugs

• Chromer does not exit when you try to shut down the laptop and you get a popup message. You need to open the terminal and kill the 'chromer' process. Ex: pkill -9 chromer

Disclaimer

I have built and tested on a single machine, your mileage might vary. I
will be happy to help if required.