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12 <h1 style="margin-top: 0;">Frequently Asked Questions</h1>
14 Below is a list of some of the commonest questions that come to
15 our attention, along with their hopefully satisfactory answers.
16 Please take a minute to search for your answers here before
17 asking the <link topic="&dactyl.list.href;">mailing list</link> or
18 <link topic="&dactyl.irc;">irc channel</link>,
19 and don't forget to peruse the
20 <link topic="&dactyl.hg.latest;&dactyl.name;/NEWS">NEWS file</link> for recent
21 changes that might throw you off balance.
26 <h2 tag="faq-general">General</h2>
27 <h3 tag="faq-fork">Why did Pentadactyl split from Vimperator?</h3>
29 The reasons for the fork were mostly political, but mostly
30 boil down to the fact that the current maintainer, while
31 making no substantial contributions to the project for several
32 years, continues to exercise full editorial control while
33 actively soliciting donations with no transparency whatever.
34 We considered the latter especially a slight on both our
35 developers and our users, and after a considerable escalation
36 of the degree of offense felt compelled to leave the project.
39 However, though we could no longer justify supporting the
40 Vimperator project, we've invested considerable time and
41 energy into the code over these past several years and still
42 use and care about it. For that reason, we've decided to
43 publicly release our personal changes and continue to develop
44 the extension under a different name.
47 <h3 tag="faq-differences">What differentiates Pentadactyl from Vimperator?</h3>
49 The main difference is that Vimperator's most active
50 developers have moved on to Pentadactyl. More qualitative
51 changes may be found in the
52 <link topic="&dactyl.hg.latest;&dactyl.name;/NEWS">change log</link>,
53 but essentially add up to what we consider more active and
54 thoughtful development. Among the most visible differences, as
55 of Pentadactyl 1.0, are more extensive Firefox 4 support,
56 significantly better startup time and completion performance,
57 considerably better :sanitize and private mode support, a
58 greatly improved incremental find implementation, major
59 improvements in Ex command parsing (including the ability to
60 separate commands with | and split long commands across lines),
61 conditionals (<ex>:if</ex>/<ex>:else</ex>) in configuration
62 files, greatly updated documentation, and a number of bug fixes.
65 <h3 tag="faq-statussymbols">What do the "[-+♥]" symbols in the status bar mean?</h3>
67 These indicate that you can move backward through history,
68 that you can move forward through history, and that the page is
69 bookmarked, respectively. See also <ex>:help</ex>
73 <h3 tag="faq-lasttab">How can I prevent <k>d</k> on the last tab from closing the window?</h3>
74 <p><ex>:set!</ex> <hl key="HelpOpt">browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab</hl>=<hl key="Boolean">false</hl></p>
76 <h3 tag="faq-regexpsearch">How can I use regular expressions in the page search?</h3>
78 Regular expression search is possible with the <tt>/Find Bar/</tt>
79 extension installed, in which case it can be toggled with the
80 <em>\r</em> and <em>\R</em> search flags. See also
81 <ex>:help</ex> <t>pattern</t>.
84 <h3 tag="faq-autocomplete"><strut/>How can I prevent the command line completion list showing until I press <k name="Tab"/>?</h3>
86 You can disable it entirely with <se opt="autocomplete"/> or for
87 specific types of command completion by choosing more
88 restrictive values. See <ex>:help</ex> <o>autocomplete</o> and
92 <h3 tag="faq-editor-fork">Why doesn't external input field editing work with my <o>editor</o> setting?</h3>
94 Unfortunately, external editors which return immediately, before
95 editing is complete, are not supported. This means that
96 <tt>gvim</tt>, for instance, must be run with the <em>-f</em>
97 flag, and editors run from a terminal must not connect to a
98 remote process. In the case of Rxvt-unicode, this means that the
99 <tt>urxvtc</tt> program is not an option, and Gnome Terminal is
100 very likely not useable under any circumstances.
103 If you are using a version of Firefox newer than 4.0 beta 7 and
104 a version of Pentadactyl less than 1.0 βeta 4, you'll need to
108 <h3 tag="faq-symlinks">Why can't I build/install from the Mercurial repository on Windows®?</h3>
110 We use symbolic links in our repository to deal with certain
111 files which are common across projects. Mercurial for Windows®,
112 unfortunately, doesn't deal with these very well. However,
113 adding the following lines to the <tt>.hg\hgrc</tt> file in your
114 repository should make things work:
116 <code><hl key="Key">[hooks]</hl>
117 update = <str delim="">python:common/contrib/fix_symlinks.py:fix_symlinks</str>
118 preupdate = <str delim="">python:common/contrib/fix_symlinks.py:fix_symlinks</str>
119 commit = <str delim="">python:common/contrib/fix_symlinks.py:fix_symlinks</str>
120 precommit = <str delim="">python:common/contrib/fix_symlinks.py:fix_symlinks</str></code>
122 <h2 tag="faq-open"><ex>:open</ex> behavior</h2>
123 <h3 tag="faq-urlsep">Why can't I separate URLs in <ex>:open</ex> with a comma anymore?</h3>
124 <p>See <ex>:help <o>urlseparator</o></ex></p>
126 <h3 tag="faq-hidden-engines">
128 <ex>:open <a>search-string</a></ex> or <ex>:open <str delim="">google</str> <a>search-string</a></ex>
129 results in <str>The url is not valid and cannot be loaded</str>
132 You need a valid search engine name in the <o>defsearch</o>
133 option. If it's stopped working suddenly, there's a good chance
134 that you've either deleted a search engine or changed its alias.
135 You can check by invoking
137 <code><ex>:dialog <str delim="">searchengines</str></ex></code>
139 There also appears to be a Firefox bug whereby the default
140 engines are hidden after an update. This can be remedied by
143 <code style="position: relative"><ex>:js</ex> services.browserSearch.getEngines().forEach(<em>function</em> (e) e.hidden = <hl key="Boolean">false</hl>)</code>
146 <h2 tag="faq-keys">Key bindings</h2>
147 <h3 tag="faq-website-keys">How can I use the native key bindings of sites like Gmail?</h3>
149 See the <o>passkeys</o> option to automatically pass specific
150 keys on sites of your choosing, or <t>autocmd-examples</t> to
151 automatically enter <em>Pass Through</em> mode for certain websites.
154 <h3 tag="faq-passkeys-autocmd">Why doesn't my modes.passAllKeys autocmd work anymore?</h3>
155 <p>See <t>faq-website-keys</t> above.</p>
157 <h2 tag="faq-hints">Hints</h2>
158 <h3 tag="faq-hintkeys">How can I use keys other than numbers for hinting?</h3>
159 <p>Use the <o>hintkeys</o> option.</p>
161 <h3 tag="faq-hintkeys-uppercase"><strut/>How can I display my hints in upper case but type them in lower case?</h3>
163 If you use alphabetic characters for your <o>hintkeys</o> and
164 would like to be able to type them in lower case but still have
165 the hints displayed in upper case, use:
167 <code><ex>:highlight</ex> <em>-a</em> Hint <hl key="Key">text-transform</hl>: <str delim="">uppercase</str>;</code>
169 <h3 tag="faq-hint-hidetext">How can I hide the hint text for input and image hints?</h3>
171 If you'd only like to show the numbered portion of hints, you
174 <code><ex>:highlight</ex> Hint<str delim="">::after</str> <hl key="Key">content</hl>: attr(<str delim="">number</str>) <hl key="Key">!important</hl>;</code>
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