Mothra Help

Mothra is a World-wide Web browser. Its display looks like this:

The display's regions, from top to bottom, are:

• Error messages and other information.
• The name of the currently selected url. This may be different from the displayed url.
• A text input window in which commands can be typed.
• A scrollable list of titles of previously visited documents, with the most recent first. Pointing at one of these lines with mouse button 1 revisits the document.
• The title of the currently-displayed document.
• The URL of the currently-displayed document.
• The scrollable document display. Underlined text and images surrounded by boxes may be pointed at with button 1 to visit the files that they refer to. Files that are not HTML documents (for example images or mailto: urls) cause 9v or mail to pop up in a new 8½ window.

Mouse Action

Pointing with button 2 instead of button 1 selects a url without following it; the url will be displayed in the selection: area and commands will refer to the url, but it will not be drawn in the document display. Button 3 pops up a command menu that contains

• alt display
  switches to (or from) the alternate display, which shows only the scrollable document display area. This might be useful when running mothra in a small window.
• snarf url
  copies the selected url into the snarf buffer.
• paste
  appends the snarf buffer to the command window.
• inline pix
  turn off/on loading of inline images. Image maps cannot be disabled.
• fix cmap
  reload the default plan 9 colormap
• save hit
  appends the selected url to file:$home/lib/hit.html
• hit list
  displays file:$home/lib/hit.html
• exit

The commands you can type are:

• g [url]
  get the page with the given url (default, the selection.)
• r [url]
  refresh the display if the URL changes. Otherwise, you will probably see a cached version.
• s file
  save the current page in the given file.
• w file
  write a bitmap image of the document display area in the given file.
• q
  exit.
• ?
  get help.
• h
  get help.

Configuration

• $url
  The default url displayed when mothra starts. A url given on the command line overrides this. The default is /sys/lib/mothra/start.html
• $httpproxy
  The network address of an http proxy server, in the format expected by dial(2). If $httpproxy is not set or is null, no proxy server is used.

Command line

Files

• mothra.log
  a list of all the url's visited
• mothra.err
  a log of error messages, mostly uninteresting
• hit.html
  the hit list used by the save hit and hit list commands. Since save hit only adds new urls to the end of this file, it is safe to edit it to add annotation or sort the saved urls.