It would be neat if Git annex addurl allowed a configuration option for a download manager command to do the actual download in place of wget/curl with a placeholder for the file name to save to & URL to get from (if that's all annex needs). That would allow the user to choose a graphical download manager if desired to make progress easier to monitor. The specific circumstance I'm seeing is with [[wishlist:_an___34__assistant__34___for_web-browsing_--_tracking_the_sources_of_the_downloads]]. I found that the existing Firefox addon [FlashGot](http://flashgot.net/) can run any command with arbitrary arguments including placeholders. Right now I've got a [script](https://gist.github.com/andyg0808/5342434) that changes to a user-selected directory and then runs git-annex addurl in it with the provided url. It works fine as a download manager for FlashGot. The issue is that there is no progress information for large file downloads. If git-annex could start a separate download manager to do the actual download, then the user would be able to check status at any time, even though the git-annex command was run from a GUI and not a terminal.

> [[done]], you can use `annex.web-download-command` now. --[[Joey]]