retawq Documentation
Sessions
Introduction
A session is information about the current state of retawq. More
precisely, it is information about all "virtual windows" which are currently
open and about the documents which are shown in the views of each window.
You can save this information at any time into an arbitrary local file with
the keyboard command "S". Once you have saved the
session, you can resume it at any later time, even after the program was quit
and restarted. This allows you to get quickly back to where you were.
To resume a session when you start the program, you can use the command-line option "--resume-session". To resume a session
while the program is running, use the keyboard command
"M"; in this case, the current state will not be "lost", it will only be
supplemented by the resumed session. Resuming from a session file will not
remove or modify the file, so you can resume from the same file again and
again.
Problems
When you save a session, not all state information is saved, because
that would result in very big, complicated files. (Simpler files have the
advantage that you can create or edit them by hand, if you want to; see the
file format description below.) The following problems can occur; they mostly
concern very rare conditions, so they shouldn't cause much trouble in
practice.
- When a document was the result of an HTTP "post" operation, you won't get
it when resuming, mostly for the following reasons: 1. the post-data (which
might be very large) won't be stored in a session file; 2. the "post" method is
often used for tasks like adding a record to a database, and adding a record
twice normally isn't a good idea.
- All of your changes in resumed HTML forms will be lost, so you might e.g.
have to re-enter texts.
- When you resume a session which contained many non-local documents (e.g.
HTTP documents), a "download storm" will break loose. This is because retawq
does not yet have a disk cache and must download all the non-local documents
again.
File Format
A session file consists of a series of text lines:
- A line beginning with a "#" character is a comment line and ignored.
- A line beginning with "W:" marks the creation of a new virtual window; any
subsequent "U:" lines will open documents in new views within that window until
the next "W:" occurs. If this line contains a "v" part with a number 0 or 1,
this means it's the currently visible window with that number.
- A line beginning with "U:" will open a URL in a new view in the current
window. The line consists of several descriptive parts; all parts besides the
URL are optional. Each part begins with the character sequence "|#|", followed
by a lower-case letter and a ":"; the letters have the following meaning:
- u: the URL of the document
- f: special flags; in this part, an "h" means "enforce HTML" (see the keyboard command "H"); an "s" will show the document as
source code, even if it would normally be interpreted as HTML; a "c" means that
this URL is the "current" one in the window, that is, the one which is shown
when the window is visible
- l: a line number, indicating how far you had scrolled down in the document;
not yet used
- w: the width of the view; not yet used
- h: a title for a document which is not interpreted as HTML (if a document
is interpreted as HTML, the title is taken from the HTML <title>
tag)
If this format seems too complicated, just save a session and have a look at
the resulting file - it's really simple. :-)
This documentation file is part of version 0.1.7 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) 2001-2003 Arne Thomaßen.