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Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>
Date: 2021-04-27
This one is going to be pretty straightforward. Last time we learned about relative navigation and marking, so it only makes sense to next learn about another one of the most useful and common tasks in the client.
First, I'll briefly mention something about Diohsc's command structure:
Many commands are operations that need input to their left, and usually what happens if you don't specify one is that Diohsc assumes you are referring to URI you are currently at. This was demonstrated last time when we were marking URI's, where the operation was "mark".
Now we are going to use "add", which puts one or more URI's into a queue for later browsing. If you are looking at a page with many links, you probably want to read more than one of them. If your target is link 1, you could type:
> 1 add
The commands can be abbreviated to the extent possible, and if it isn't necessary the space can even be omitted, like so:
> 1a
Now, to visit that address you queued up, you can refer to it using the special "~" character, which refers to top item in your queue. You can also use the command "n" to just go to the next one, which is easier to type.
As you might have seen in the documentation, you can refer to ranges of links and/or individual links, so this is also valid:
> 1-10,15,17a
I often find myself using descending ranges to read posts in chronological order, which is no problem, like:
> 10-5a
You can feel free to play around with this and try things like omitting the bounds of the range in order to select links from the beginning to the end of the document. Surprisingly, this works:
> -a
You can filter this with an asterisk in order to select only unvisited links, so this:
> *-a
Will queue all unvisited links on the page. There is also a hack included to be able to "-0" to get all links in reverse order.
Normally queue items are added to the end of the queue, but you can specify where to insert them to the right of the "add" operation, and specifying a place of "0" will add the links to the beginning of the quee instead of the end of it, like:
> 1-3a0
Queue items will be removed once you visit them, but if you get tired of your queue, which even persists between sessions, you can use "delete" to remove them. Usually what you want to do is clear the entire queue from the first item "~" to the last:
>~-d
There are a few other tricks with the queue, but I found these to be the most useful in my daily browsing. You can type "help queue" to learn a few more things.
One thing that you might want to do is add items to your queue while a page is in the process of being paged and before you have reached the Diohsc prompt. I haven't talked about Diohsc's pager yet, but it's pretty straightforward. ("help pager" tells you everything you need to know.) What I found most useful in its help section is the existence of the escape keys ":" or ">" that allow you to enter a command for Diohsc without exiting the pager, so you can add items to your queue and then continue reading the document at your leisure. I only just learned this a few days ago!
Remember, when you are opening an item from your queue, you can't go "back" to the page you were looking at before since it's a new context. (You'll remember this from relative navigation in the last post.) As usual, this will send you back to the last context:
> ''
With the queue at your disposal, you can basically do all of your browsing for the entire session with no inconveniences. Is it possible to browse without the queue? Yes, of course, but I will address that in a future post. After extensive use, I find utilizing the queue to be the best method for managing your session.
Have questions? Think I forgot something? Please let me know!