Introducing url-peek: A simple Quarto filter for domain previews

When writing documents, it’s often useful to provide some context for links, especially when the URL itself isn’t visible in the text. For example, if you reference a resource with link, the reader doesn’t immediately know where the link leads unless they hover over it or click.

To address this, I created url-peek, a small Quarto filter that automatically adds the domain of a link in brackets after the link text. This gives readers a quick visual cue about the destination without cluttering the document too much.

How it works

With url-peek, a link like this:

[link](https://github.com/schochastics/quarto-url-peek))

would render as

<a href="https://github.com/schochastics/quarto-url-peek">link</a> [github.com]

Here is a visual example:

This keeps the document readable while still providing useful context.

Customization

The extension also allows some customization of how the domain is displayed. You can adjust the text color and font size by setting parameters in your Quarto document’s metadata.

For example, to style the domain in blue and set the font size to 12px, you can add this to your YAML header:

domain_style:
  color: "blue"
  font_size: "14px"

This helps integrate the preview into different styles and formats without disrupting the overall design of the document.

Install

quarto add schochastics/quarto-url-peek

This will install the extension under the _extensions subdirectory. If you’re using version control, you will want to check in this directory.

Summary

This is really is just a small utility, but I think it can add context to external links without making the document visually noisy and help readers identify trusted sources at a glance.