URL schemes like https: and mailto: are standard fare, but custom schemes become essential for apps that exist both in the browser and as native software. Notion and Figma are two prime examples. Both offer URLs for nearly everything, which is convenient until you prefer the native desktop experience over the browser tab.

Sharing a Notion page link, for instance, yields a standard https:// URL. That works fine in a browser, but it bypasses the native Notion application running on your machine. Notion’s developers anticipated this: replacing the https:// portion of any page link with notion:// will force that link to open directly in the native app. It is a simple swap, and the protocol name is the only difference between the web and native versions.

Fortunately, Notion’s dev team thought about that, and built the notion:// link protocol. If you replace the https:// portion of any Notion page link with notion://, your link will automatically open within the native app instead of a web browser.

Thomas Frank

Manually editing every link before sharing is tedious. A more practical approach, especially on macOS, is to use a utility like Choosy. The tool works not by altering the links themselves, but by intercepting them and redirecting known application links to their native counterparts.

Rule-Based Redirects

The cleanest setup is to configure Choosy so it never prompts for a browser. Instead, it silently applies a set of predefined rules. Under the settings, you register the applications you use regularly.

For Notion, the rule is straightforward: watch for any link to Notion, and open it in Notion.

The same pattern applies to other apps like Figma or Slack. Once the rules are in place, the routing happens automatically.

A Necessary Caveat

There is one recurring exception. Occasionally, a workflow requires a specific web page that the native app cannot handle. A password reset flow, for example, might direct you to a slack.com page that only exists in the browser. If Choosy intercepts that and tries to force it into Slack.app, the page fails to load, and you can get stuck in a loop. In those situations, you temporarily need to disable the relevant rule and re-enable it once the flow completes.