			Introduction to the World of ELinks

The goal of this introduction is to explain the basic concepts in ELinks, give
an overview of how to get started and serve as an entry point to many of the
(undocumented) features of ELinks. It won't tell you all the details, but
should hopefully give you an idea of how things work and make it possible for
you to even figure out how to go further.

Allthough ELinks is text-based, the user interface has many of interaction
methods normally found in graphical environments. There are menus, dialogs
with buttons and hierarchic list boxes with folders. Care has been taken to
make the interaction between various dialogs consistent, so the controls will
quickly become familiar to new users.

The user interface can be controlled using both mouse and keyboard, but
currently it is only possible to configure keybindings. Looking back, the
key-controls have been more advanced than the mouse support, but during the
0.10 prereleases the mouse support has been much improved. You will now find
find stuff like contextual menus when right-clicking in different document
zones.


Overview of the User Interface
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The most important dialogs, that you will meet, include the Main, Link and Tab
menus and the different managers. The menus serve as entry points to the
actions available from different contexts, while the managers let you check
the state and control the various subsystems, such as loaded cookies and the
global history. The utility menus and the manager tools are investigated
further below.

The document viewer in ELinks provides a feature-rich set of ways to browse
documents. That is, multiple options exist for navigating, searching and
displaying documents and you will hopefully figure in time what works best for
you. The basic browsing possibilities are presented below.

ELinks is highly configurable, so if there is something that you would like to
change it is most likely possible. The best overview of the many options are
given in the elinks.conf(5) man page. Keybindings are discussed in the
elinkskeys(5) man page. It is not always up-to-date, so you should also check
the keybinding manager and the overview of all the configured keybindings
given in the Help -> Keys dialog. The Keys dialogs serves as a good
introduction to the most common keybindings.


The Main, Link and Tab Menus
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Main Menu gives you access to many of the features of ELinks via submenus
and serves as a good entry point for performing actions on the different
objects of interest such as links, documents and tabs. The Link menu and Tab
menus are more specialized and targeted to a specific context, such as link
handling or managing the tab bar. Actually the Link Menu is accessible from
the Main Menu as a submenu.

Once you have familiarized yourself with the menus you will have a good chance
at gradually learning the most common keybinding, since all the configured
keybindings are shown as right aligned text. Menu entries can also be quickly
accessed using hotkeys. Hotkeys appear highlighted in the menu entry text. For
example the key-combo: "<Alt>-v i" will open the document info dialog
accessible from the View sub menu in the Main menu.


Note: This is still a work in progress and from here on an below everything is
marked TODO!


The Managers
~~~~~~~~~~~~

The managers let you control the state of subsystems, such as cookies and the
global history.

List boxes and buttons.


Navigation
~~~~~~~~~~

ELinks provides various ways to navigate documents. Depending on how documents
are structured it can be a great help to change navigation style.

 - Link Oriented Navigation:
   Directional and Up/Down.

 - Cursor Routing

 - Mouse?


Useful Document Display Options
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Toggling color modes, plain/html and image link rendering.

Link numbering. 

 - Insert mode in text-input form-fields

Searching
~~~~~~~~~

 - Text searching using the normal search dialog

 - Incremental document text searching

 - Link searching


Hints and Odd Features
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 - Numerical action prefixes. Example 3<Down> jumps down three links.

$Id: introduction.txt,v 1.3 2004/12/23 02:21:38 jonas Exp $
