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| |   (_) __ _| |__ | |_  / | __  __  _____ _____             
| |   | |/ _` | '_ \| __| | | \ \/ / |_____|_____|_____ _____ 
| |___| | (_| | | | | |_  | |_ >  <  |_____|_____|_____|_____|
|_____|_|\__, |_| |_|\__| |_(_)_/\_\                          
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Light 1.x version 1.4

[ Basic Operation | Bookmarks | Download | (Mis)Features | Configuration | Keyboard Operation ]

Release Notes

This is Light 1.4, almost complete code rewrite since version 1.3. Many things were reimplemented to be better, faster, smaller, at least in theory :)

NOTE: This is the last release which adds new features. From now on any sequential releases will be bugfix-only. Light 2.0 branch (codename Bloat) will have more standard "browser" features such as Bookmarks, Preferences, etc.

There is no "Preferences" dialog, and Light 1.x series will not have one. All the settings currently used by Light are stored in $HOME/.light/prefs.js file. Please see the Configuration section for information how to configure Light.

Basic Operation

Overview

Each browser window has a menubar, toolbar, and statusbar. Menu lists all of the available commands and shortcut keys used to access them. Toolbar contains the standard Back, Forward, Reload and Stop buttons, as well as an Address entry box. Statusbar contains activity indicator, status text area, and load progress indicator.

Menu

Menu lists all of the available commands and shortcut keys used to access them. Shortcut key assignment used by Light follows that of Netscape Navigator 4.x. One exception is Text Size shortcut, please see Configuration::Visual section for more information. For a list of all keyboard shortcuts, please see Keyboard Operation section.

Toolbar

Toolbar contains standard browsing navigation buttons, Address entry box, and Fifo bookmarks button. By default, Toolbar buttons have icons. Please see Configuration::Visual section for information how to disable toolbar icons. Address entry box is fairly standard, except that it doesn't have the drop down "history" list.

Statusbar

Statusbar is split into 3 sections: activity indicator, status text area, and page load progress indicator. Activity indicator is a little box that displays a simple animation during page load. The same functionality as the "N" logo in Netscape, globe in IE, and so on. Status text area displays network messages, javascript info, URL for the current link under mouse cursor, etc. Some system messages are also displayed there. Page load indicator shows currently loading page progress in percent or activity mode if size is unknown.

Search Box

Search Box, available from the Utils menu, or by using Alt+/ shortcut key, provides a quick shortcut to some of the useful search engines. But... you whine... I don't want to search Google or Freshmeat... I want to search using my favorite search engine, AOL webcrawler! OK. Check out Configuration::Search section to find out how to configure your own personal search engine for the "Custom" entry in the Search Box. However, if AOL webcrawler is your favorite search engine, perhaps you should reconsider using this program.

Bookmarks

Light does not have a traditional "bookmark" system. While some people might find this strange or non-productive, the author believes that bookmarks are a waste of time, and thinks that most information available on the "web" is usually not worth looking at more than once.

Instead of "bookmarks", Light uses the concept of a "fifo" buffer, where URLs can be temporarily stored in a circular buffer (size configurable at compile time), to be recalled later on. All of the right-click context menus have the option to "Copy link location to fifo", which adds the link or image URL to the bookmark buffer. Small window will pop-up where you can enter a few words about this link. By default, this is filled with the link title and selected, so you can press <Backspace> to clear it and type something new, or press <Enter> to use the provided title. This text will appear in the "Name" column in the Fifo listing. You can press <Escape> key to cancel adding a link.

Address entry box contents can also be added to the fifo - right click anywhere in the Address entry, or use the Alt-. shortcut key.

You can access current list of stored URLs by clicking on the Fifo button to the right of the Address entry box or pressing Alt+I shortcut key. This will open a popup window with a list of all URLs currently in Fifo buffer. Double-clicking on a link or using arrow keys and pressing <spacebar> or <Enter> will take you to the selected URL.

Following modifier keys are used:

  • Control - delete selected URL from Fifo buffer
  • Alt - copy selected URL to clipboard
  • Shift - loads the selected URL and deletes it from Fifo buffer (double-click)

    Same modifiers apply to both clicking or selecting with <spacebar> or <Enter>.

    There is no "Undo" function for the delete operation, so pay attention to what you delete. Fifo buffer is saved to disk after each modification. Light reads contents on the Fifo buffer during startup.

    Default buffer size is 16 entries, which should be more than enough for casual browsing. After all 16 slots are filled, the oldest entry is deleted and all the entries are shifted forward. "First In, First Out". There is no technical limit on the size of Fifo buffer - URL list window will scroll if there are too many entries. Please see Configuration::Visual section to learn how to adjust Fifo window parameters.

    Download

    Light uses standard Mozilla download components. Which means you will get a XUL prompt to "Save file as...", followed by a filepicker to choose the destination location, and finally a download progress dialog. These are identical to what Mozilla uses.

    If Mozilla decides to display the file as text (As in case of bz2 files on some broken servers), you can do the usual shift-click to save the link.

    On links, you can also select "Download link" from the context menu. This will simply start your configured download manager with the provided link. Obviously, this won't work for stupid sites that use cookies or referrers or other nazi techniques to make you suffer.

    You can still Copy link/image location to clipboard and use wget or some download manager to get the links that way.

    (Mis)Features

  • There is no "Exit" menu or shortcut key. Light exits and saves all settings when the last Light window is closed. This is intentional, and will stay this way.
  • Double-clicking in the URL entry will select the entire URL. This is different from the standard GTK behaviour, but this is one of the places where double-click makes a lot more sense than triple-click. Besides, all the other browsers select the entire URL on double click, so why should users change their habits here?
  • There is no "history" drop down list in the URL entry. This is intentional, and will stay this way.
  • There is no "cookie manager". If you are so paranoid about cookies, get a life. If you want to erase a particular cookie, check out $HOME/.light/cookies.txt with your favorite text editor.
  • There is no "Don't load images from this site" manager. You don't want to see ads, there is always Squid, JunkBuster, and /etc/hosts. Seriously, get a grip. Also, check out Mozilla preferences for image load behaviour and paste them into Light's prefs.js. Please see Configuration::Proxy section for information how to configure Light to access Internet through a proxy, such as Junkbuster or Squid.

    Configuration

    Overview

    The only way to configure Light is to edit $HOME/.light/prefs.js. This is a plain text file which contains all the interesting settings. See the sections below for information on each setting. Format of a typical preference entry follows:

    user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://localhost/");

    Portions marked in red are always present. First colored entry is the preference name, and the second is it's value. String preferences, such as the homepage, must be enclosed in quotes. There are also numeric preferences, such as port numbers or cache size, and boolean preferences, which can be set to "true" or "false".

    If a particular preference is described in this document, but not present in prefs.js, simply add it anywhere in the file, following the format described above. Next time Light is started, the preference will take effect.

    Preferences can only be edited while Light is not running, otherwise all your changes will be erased, because preferences are saved on each exit

    Configuration::General

    browser.startup.homepage
    This is the default "home" page loaded if you start Light without command-line arguments. Default is "about:blank".

    browser.cache.disk_cache_size
    This is the size of disk cache, though it appears that in current versions of Mozilla it's rewritten on each startup. Integer value in kilobytes. Default is 4096 kilobytes (4mb).

    browser.cache.memory_cache_size
    Size of the memory cache, in kilobytes. Default is 1024. (1mb).

    Configuration::Search

    network.search.url
    This is the search URL used when doing "Custom" search from the search box. Go to your favorite search engine, find type something in as a search query, and notice how the search URL is formed. Put that as the value for this preference entry, replacing search query with "%s". For example, Google search entry would look like: "http://www.google.com/search?q=%s".

    Configuration::Visual

    browser.display.background_color
    This is the default background color for pages that don't specify it. Default is "white" (#ffffff), but you can delete that line for the standard "gray" netscape-style background color. Also see the next preference.

    browser.display.use_system_colors
    This is a boolean preference which determines if user-specified background/foreground colors are used. When set to "true", custom colors are ignored. When set to false, user-specified values are used

    light.chrome.width and light.chrome.height
    These numeric preferences control initial geometry of Light window. Default setting is 800x600, though this can be changed by javascript popup windows. Geometry settings are NOT saved on exit, so this is the place to change if you want Light windows bigger or smaller by default.

    light.chrome.fifoheight
    This is the maximum size, in pixels, of the Light Fifo bookmarks popup window. Default setting is 300. Another setting which can be configured at compile-time is the size of Fifo buffer. Check out light.h and look for the FIFO_SIZE define. Default is 16, but if it's set to 0, buffer size is unlimited, and old entries will never be removed.

    light.toolbar.pixmaps
    This is a integer preference controlling whether Light shows labels, pixmaps, or both in the toolbar buttons. 0 means labels only, 1 means pixmaps only, and 2 means both labels and pixmaps. Default setting is "2".

    font.default
    This is the default font style used, if the web page doesn't specify a font. Default is "sans-serif", and it can be set to either "serif" or "sans-serif".

    font.name.(style).(encoding)
    This sets the font name for the (style) with a particular (encoding). Allowed values for (style) are: serif, sans-serif, and monospace. Allowed values for encoding are: x-western, ar, el, he, ja, ko, th, tr, x-baltic, x-central-euro, x-cyrillic, x-unicode, zh-CN, zh-TW, although chances are you are only interested in the values for x-western encoding. The font names are in the Mozilla font format (foundry)-(name)-(encoding), for example adobe-times-iso8859-1 or adobe-helvetica-iso8859-1, or ricoh-mincho-jisx0208.1983-0. During the initial preferences set, Light will only add entries for x-western encoding. If you want to use custom fonts for your particular encoding, duplicate x-western entry in prefs.js, and change it according to your preferences.

    font.size.variable.(encoding)
    This sets the default font size. (encoding) values are the same as the names from the font entry. Default is 14, which can be changed here, or temporarily changed by using the Alt-[ and Alt-] keys to decrease or increase current font size. Alt-Backslash restores the size to default setting from the preferences.

    If there is a ~/.light/pixmaps, Light will look there for the toolbar icons to use instead of default ones. You will need any or all of the following: back.xpm, fifo.xpm, forward.xpm, reload.xpm, stop.xpm. If a file doesn't exist a default icon will be used for that button.

    Configuration::Download

    light.download.handler
    This is the command used to download something. It can include one %s, which will be replaced with the URL to download. If the downloader program you use doesn't automatically fork in background, make sure and use "&" at the end of command line. Some examples:
    "nt %s &"
    "xterm -T Download -geometry 80x5 -rv -e wget %s &"
    Make sure to escape " characters inside the string with \".

    Configuration::Proxy

    network.proxy.type
    This numeric setting determines whether the rest of the proxy settings are enabled or not. If set to 1, Mozilla will try to connect using proxy settings, and if set to 0, direct connection is used.

    network.proxy.no_proxies_on
    This is a space separated list of hosts to access directly, bypassing the proxy. For example, "192.168.0.10 localbox wwwdev".

    network.proxy.(type) and network.proxy.(type)_port
    Each of these settings configures proxy access for a particular protocol. There are 5 protocol types to choose from:

  • FTP
  • Gopher
  • HTTP
  • SSL
  • Socks

    For each proxy setting you are interested in configuring, set the network.proxy.(name) to the proxy host, and network.proxy.(name)_port to the port. For example, to connect to a Junkbuster proxy on localhost:3131, use the following setting:
    user_pref("network.proxy.http", "localhost");
    user_pref("network.proxy.http_port", 3131);

    Keyboard Operation

    The following table lists all the available keyboard shortcuts with a brief description of each.

    shortcutdescription
    Alt-NOpen New Window
    Alt-OOpen Local File
    Alt-WClose current Window
    Alt-SSave current page to disk
    Alt-IBring up Fifo Bookmarks Window
    Alt-/Bring up Search Box
    Alt-.Add URL Entry to Fifo
    Alt-DGo to Address entry box
    Alt-FFind text on the current page
    Alt-UView Page source (unimplemented)
    Alt-\Return to Normal text size
    Alt-[Smaller Text size (also Alt--)*
    Alt-]Bigger Text size (also Alt-=)
    Alt-RReload current page
    Alt-Shift-RReload current page bypassing cache
    Alt-LeftGo Back in History List
    Alt-RightGo Forward in History List
    Esc (in document)Stop loading current page
    Esc (in address entry)Go back to document
    Esc (in dialogs)Close current dialog
    Ctl-7Toggle Menubar visibility
    Ctl-8Toggle Toolbar visibility
    Ctl-9Toggle Statusbar visibility

    By default, Light is compiled with Alt-[ and Alt-] for text resizing shortcuts. However, some keyboards do not have [ and ] keys. Please see the INSTALL file for further instructions how to configure this.



    [ Basic Operation | Bookmarks | Download | (Mis)Features | Configuration | Keyboard Operation ]

    This documentation was written by timecop@japan.co.jp