Chapter 4. The Ultimate Bookmarks Guide

Table of Contents

The Bookmark Manager
The Ancient Forests
Searching for a needle in the haystack
File formats
Native file format
XBEL file format
Usage hints

Glad to see you again, mortal. Now, we are going to learn about bookmarks - how to use them, how to maintain them, and also something more about the file formats and maybe even about the code structure later. But don't fear, we won't burden you with it, just stop reading when you already know enough.

In order to read this, you need some common sense, the ability to start ELinks and some idea about what's a Web document, a URL address and knowledge like that.

If we ever mention some keys here, please note that you can rebind almost any action to another key which you like more - then you must obviously imagine your own key in place of that. Below, we will list all actions, options and so on related to bookmarks. We won't tell you how to rebind the keys, though; another document will take on that.

Somewhat out-of-order, a very frequent FAQ: In order to move bookmarks around, you need to mark them first - press Insert or * (if you use the default keymap) to do that.

The Bookmark Manager

Basically, almost everything is going on in the so-called bookmark manager. That's a special dialog window, which contains a listing of all the bookmarks you ever told ELinks to remember and it lets you to do with them anything you would ever want to do with them.

You launch the bookmark manager by pressing the s key in standby (standard) mode. You should see a big empty space (bookmarks will slowly appear there as you will add them) and couple of buttons shriveling at the bottom. So, as a start, move with the right (or left; both will do) arrow to the button Add bookmark and fill in the input fields it offers to you. I mean, you can type something like "ELinks homepage" to the first field, then move down by e.g. the down arrow and fill "http://elinks.cz/" to the second field. Then, bravely press enter and watch the bookmark popping up at the top of the vast area reserved for bookmarks.

Repeat this step few times. Now, you can move between bookmarks by the up and down arrow, jump to the location any of them points to by the Goto button, change it by the Edit button, delete it with the Delete button and so on. When you'll become bored, press the escape button and you're free again!