Searching & downloading

This section describes how to search for files and download them. I will assume that you have successfully managed to connect to a hub. If not, see Connecting to a hub first.

Using the search dialog

Press the search button or CTRL-S to bring up the search dialog for the currently selected hub (click on a hub tab to select it). You can have several search dialogs open at one time, one for each connected hub.

The search dialog consists of some controls for searching, and a result window. The result can be presented as either an ordinary list or in a tree-like form. Click on the "list view" and "tree view" tabs to select which one. Both views has their pros and cons, experiment with them to get a feel for when to prefer one over the other.

Search strings are typed into the text field labeled "Search". Typing a space between words makes dc-qt search for the exact string. A $ instead of space means "and". Better handling of this will be added in the next release. If you are searching for a certain type of file, music for example, select it from the "type" drop-down box. You can also limit the number of search results by specifying the size to be at least or at most a given value, although this is not required. Click the "Search" button to search on the current hub, or click "Multihub" to search on all connected hubs. Search results from other hubs will show in their respective search dialogs. Therefore, when using the multihub search, you may get some new search dialogs popping up. This may not be the best approch, but it lets you distinguish between search results so that you always know on which hub a certain file was found.

Interpretating the results

There are two ways to view search results, the list view and the tree view. The list view works as in ordinary Direct Connect clients. You can sort the results by user, filename, size and so on by clicking on the column headers. The treeview is a bit different. It orders the search results by users and their directorys. Double click on a user or folder to expand it.

Downloading a file

So you've searched for something, found it and now you want to download it. Easy. Just double click on the file, or select it, right click and press "Download". Keep an eye on the "Slots" column, it shows you how many free slots the user had when you committed your search (free/total). If the first digit reads 0, you will not be able to download the file until a slot is free. The download should appear in the transfer list in your main window. See the next section to learn how to use it.

You can download the same file from several users at the same time, making the download faster in some cases. Right now, you must manually add the sources for a file by double clicking on the files, in the future this will be automated.

You can also download whole directories or download to another directory than the default. The menu that pops up when right-clicking provides these functions.

Using the transfer list

The transfer list, located in the main window, holds four tabs. The "Downloads" tab displays all currently running downloads. Right clicking an item in this tab allows you to stop a download or remove a source (when downloading from multiple sources). The "Uploads" tab displays all running uploads. You can abort them as well. The "File Queue" tab shows the download queue, which is a list of files that you are waiting for to download. The "History" tabs shows some download/upload statistics.
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