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retawq Documentation
Keyboard Commands

Introduction

You use retawq by entering keyboard commands. Most commands consist of a single key; some commands require additional input, e.g. a URL you want to browse to or an explicit confirmation for a possibly "dangerous" command. Most keys have been chosen so that you can remember them easily; e.g. "n" for "new window", "h" for "home URL" and "l" for "scroll down one line".

The Escape key can be used to cancel several operations, e.g. all commands which require additional input and all menus.

Keyboard Commands

Window Handling:

  • n - create a new "virtual window"; the old window in which you were working will not be removed (and downloads running there won't be stopped), you can get back to it with the commands "w", "W" and "Ctrl-w".
  • N - open the current document in a new window
  • C - close the current window
  • 1 - un-split the screen
  • 2 - split the screen
  • Tab (tabulator) - switch between visible windows when the screen is split
  • w/W - go to the next/previous virtual window in the list of all virtual windows; for higher comfort, you probably want to use the command "Ctrl-w" instead.
  • Ctrl-w - show a list of all currently existing windows in a menu

View Handling:

  • Cursor-left - go back to the previous document in the series of documents in the current window
  • Cursor-right - go to the next document in the series of documents in the current window; note: to follow a link, use the Return/Enter/o key instead (see below) - here retawq differs from other browsers.
  • Page-down/Space - scroll down one screenfull of lines in the current document
  • Page-up - scroll up one screenfull of lines in the current document
  • l/L (and Delete/Insert) - scroll down/up one line in the current document
  • Home - scroll up to the top of the current document

Web Browsing:

  • Cursor-down - go to the next link (or HTML form element) in the current web page
  • Cursor-up - go to the previous link (or HTML form element) in the current web page
  • Return/Enter/o - open the current link (or activate the HTML form element for editing) in the current window; note that you can't activate form elements which are marked disabled or read-only in the HTML source code (but check the keyboard command "E")! Before submitting a form, make sure that it has been downloaded completely and that you've scrolled down to its end at least once; otherwise the form data might be sent incompletely.
  • O - open the current link in a new window
  • r - reload the current document without looking into retawq's internal cache
  • R - like "r", but additionally tries to bypass external caches; it also tries again to lookup the hostname if that failed previously
  • g - go to a new URL; you can enter the new URL at the bottom of the screen; to cancel, press the Return key without entering anything, or press the Escape key. See URL Schemes for information about currently supported URLs.
  • G - like "g", but the new URL is preset to the URL of the current document so you can edit it
  • \ (backslash) - show the HTML source code of the current web page; use Cursor-left to get back to the web page
  • i - show information about the current link (or HTML form element) in the message line at the bottom of the screen
  • h - go to the "home" URL; by default, this is the retawq project home page; you can change this or turn it off completely with the run-time configuration option "home".
  • e - go to your favorite search engine URL; you can set this with the run-time configuration option "search-engine".
  • b - go to a bookmarks document URL; you can set this with the run-time configuration option "bookmarks".
  • j - "jump" to a URL; you just enter a shortcut, and retawq goes to the associated URL as configured with the run-time configuration option "jumps". This is useful if you visit several URLs regularly and don't want to re-type the whole URLs each time, or if you want to "insert arguments" into often-used URL patterns, e.g. when using search engines.
  • J - like "j", but the new jump shortcut is preset to the previously entered shortcut so you can edit it
  • E - enable a disabled HTML form element; some wannabe-clever web page authors e.g. mark a submit button as disabled and let the browser enable it with a Javascript statement when the user fills in a certain text field; these authors ignore all the browsers which can't deal with Javascript - that's why you might need this command some time...

Other Commands:

  • m - show the contextual menu
  • u - show the URL history (a list of the most recently used URLs)
  • s - save the current document to disk; you'll be asked for a filename.
  • H - interpret the current document as HTML code; use this command if retawq can't determine the document kind automatically, e.g. when the name of a local HTML file doesn't end with ".htm" or ".html". - Please be careful to use this command only if the document really consists of HTML code; otherwise you'll see some mess on the screen because e.g. line breaks are shown as space characters and anything after a "<" will be interpreted as an (invalid) HTML tag and probably not be displayed.
  • Y - When you've enabled the mouse support (see the compile-time configuration option OPTION_TEXTMODEMOUSE), you can use this command to switch the terminal between the following two modes: "register mouse clicks on links and HTML form elements" and "allow copy-paste".
  • Q - quit retawq


This documentation file is part of version 0.1.4 of retawq, a network client created by Arne Thomaßen. retawq is basically released under certain versions of the GNU General Public License and WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. Copyright (C) 2001-2002 Arne Thomaßen.