_ _ _ _ _ | | (_) __ _| |__ | |_ / | __ __ _____ _____ | | | |/ _` | '_ \| __| | | \ \/ / |_____|_____|_____ _____ | |___| | (_| | | | | |_ | |_ > < |_____|_____|_____|_____| |_____|_|\__, |_| |_|\__| |_(_)_/\_\ |___/
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.
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 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 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 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, 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.
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:
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.
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.
$HOME/.light/cookies.txt
with your favorite text editor.
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
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).
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".
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.
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 \".
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:
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);
The following table lists all the available keyboard shortcuts with a brief description of each.
shortcut | description |
---|---|
Alt-N | Open New Window |
Alt-O | Open Local File |
Alt-W | Close current Window |
Alt-S | Save current page to disk |
Alt-I | Bring up Fifo Bookmarks Window |
Alt-/ | Bring up Search Box |
Alt-. | Add URL Entry to Fifo |
Alt-D | Go to Address entry box |
Alt-F | Find text on the current page |
Alt-U | View Page source (unimplemented) |
Alt-\ | Return to Normal text size |
Alt-[ | Smaller Text size (also Alt--)* |
Alt-] | Bigger Text size (also Alt-=) |
Alt-R | Reload current page |
Alt-Shift-R | Reload current page bypassing cache |
Alt-Left | Go Back in History List |
Alt-Right | Go 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-7 | Toggle Menubar visibility |
Ctl-8 | Toggle Toolbar visibility |
Ctl-9 | Toggle 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.