Introduction

You can surf the web with the text-based retawq web browser. Text-based means you will not see any graphics. That is a great feature, because it means you will not see any graphical ads while surfing the web

Remember the DS has only 4MB of RAM, so some larger pages may crash the browser.

This section assumes you have already successfully connected to your wireless network.

To run the web browser type:

 retawq

Or to have retawq open a web site (e.g. dslinux.org) when it starts up type:

 retawq www.dslinux.org

This browser intentionally keeps all visited pages in memory as long as they are "referenced", i.e. used in a window. To drop these references and free the memory, close the window with the keyboard command "C". If you have a sequence of pages in a window, you can alternatively use the keyboard command "N" to open a new window which contains only the current page, then close the old window to get rid of all the other pages.

Basic commands

m - menu
S - save current session
M - resume saved session
Q - quit retawq
esc - cancel current line input operation

Commands for surfing

g - go to url
G - edit current url
D-pad left - back
D-pad right - forward
D-pad up - go to previous link
D-pad down - go to next link
Enter or o - open link in current window or activate form element (i.e. to write in a textfield)
O - open link in new window
Ctrl-o - like 'O' but split screen
r - reload current window
R - forced (bypass cache) reload, or retry failed url
. (dot) - stop
D - download from current link
Ctrl-d - download from user specified url
H - force interpret current page as html (e.g. if page does not end in .htm or .html)

Commands for window handling

n - new blank window
N - open current page in new window
C - close the current window
1 (one, not small L) - unslplit the screen
2 - split the screen
Tab - switch between visible split windows
w or W - next window
Ctrl-w - list all windows
Y-Button/space - page down
X-Button - page up
l (small L, not one) - scroll up
L - scroll down

Informational commands

/ - find on current page, forward (not case sensitive)
? - find on current page, backward (not case sensitive)
\ - view source (use D-pad left to get back to normal view)
i - show link or form information
I - show overview of current web page's link/form/image information in new window
u - url history

Run time configuration options

You can create a configuration file to set things like: homepage, search engine, bookmarks, etc. This file must be called 'config'. It is recommended that vi is used to format this file, to avoid formatting issues.

There are many run time configuration options. Not all options are covered here. Please see the sourceforge docmentation for more info.

Some useful options are:

bookmarks - a bookmarks document that will be displayed when you press 'b' in retawq
dont-confirm - don't confirm before executing the potentially dangerous commands (quit, close, overwrite, form-submit, form-reset, form-repost, enforce-html, and enable)
home - sets homepage
jumps - sets shortcuts for frequently used urls (e.g. google for www.google.com)
keymap - assign keys to retawq actions.
search-engine - sets default search engine (e.g. www.google.com)
http-cookies - turn cookies on/off for all or certain urls

Example config file:

 #This is a commented line.
 bookmarks local:/home/bookmarks.html 
 #then create bookmarks.html and place it in your home directory
 dont-confirm quit close overwrite
 home http://www.dslinux.org
 jumps 
  google www.google.com 
  dslinux www.dslinux.org
  s http://www.foo-search.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?what=!1&matchnum=42 !1
 #  When you enter "s 'search terms'" w/keyboard command "j" retawq replaces '!1 w/ 'search terms and     
 #  opens the results of the search
  help local:/usr/local/doc/retawq/index.html 
 # Then create the help file index.html and place it in /usr/local/doc/retawq/
 keymap command
  ctrl-n document-search-next #assign a keyboard command to 'find next'
  ctrl-p document-search-previous #assign a keyboard command to 'find previous'
  ctrl-a document-top #since we don't have a home key, reassign keyboard command for home
  ctrl-e document-bottom #since we don't have an end key, reassign keyboard command for end
  ctrl-r form-reset #assign keyboard command to reset html form
  ctrl-s form-submit #assign keyboard command to submit html form
 search-engine www.google.com
 # http-cookies
 #  allow www.yahoo.com # allow cookies for yahoo.com
 #  deny * # deny everything else
 #OR
 http-cookies
  allow * # allow all cookies

Let us say that you created the config file at 'path/to/config'. To have retawq load the config file on start up, use one of the following two commands to start the browser:

 retawq --userdir=path/to

 retawq --userdir=path/to www.dslinux.org

The following keyboard commands require run-time configuration options:

h - home
e - search
b - book marks
j - jump to url via shortcut
J - edit last jump
E - enable a disabled HTML form element

More about retawq

Here is a list of links that will help you find more information about retawq: