I wish that gnome-terminal was able to support multi-line URLs, or that mutt was able to render long urls on a single logical line.

If you use mutt in gnome-terminal, you may have noticed that urls that wrap to another line cannot be opened using gnome-terminal's context menu. Of course, resizing the terminal to be wide enough works around the problem, but is not always practical.

Another workaround is to pipe the message to less. While the url will still be displayed split across multiple lines, gnome-terminal will then recognize the whole url as one thing.

Why does less work where mutt fails? Well, it seems that mutt and less print the url differently. less simply prints the whole url, and lets gnome-terminal wrap it to the next line. mutt prints the first line of the url, then moves the cursor to the start of the next line, and prints the remainder.

This could be fixed either by making gnome-terminal smarter about finding the end of urls that are sent to it in multiple pieces, or by making mutt (or likely really ncurses) change how it outputs long lines.