Mothra Help

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

[mothra display]

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

Commands

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

Mothra gets configuration information from the environment.

$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

If the mothra command has an argument, it is the name of a url to visit instead of the startup page. Giving mothra the -i flag disables loading of inline images. The inline pix menu item will reset this option.

Files

Mothra creates several files in $home/lib/mothra.