DeckScape Help

The DeckScape display contains two areas: a menubar with entries File and Decks, and a workspace area. The workspace area initially contains one deck. When you click on the blue links in a document, the link is fetched and the new document is displayed on the deck. As you interact in DeckScape, the workspace will become populated with multiple decks, pages that have been "torn off" decks, and a variety of dialog boxes.

The File menu

The New Deck command creates a new deck, initially displaying your home page (the value of the environment variable WWW_HOME).

The Search... command brings up a dialog that allows you to search for a text string in all documents you've viewed while running DeckScape. Those documents which contain hits are copied into a new deck.

The Help... command brings up this help window.

The Quit command exits DeckScape and saves the current list of pages in each deck into the file $HOME/.deckscape.

The Decks menu

The entries in this menu are the names of decks. Selecting a deck will bring it to the top of the windows in the workspace. The name of the deck is prefixed by a closed icon, then the deck will be opened and then brought to the top.

The first two entries in this menu are HotList and Global History. These decks are provided autmoatically by DeckScape and cannot be deleted. (The global history is currently not implemented, however.)

Manipulating Decks

The top banner line of the deck is used to manipulate the deck. Close the deck using the close icon at the left. The downward pointing triangle next to the close icon is the base of a pulldown menu of deck commands. Reposition the deck by dragging the title. Merge the contents of a deck by drag-and-dropping the Merge button onto another deck. Leaf through the contents of a deck using the left and right arrow buttons, and go to the bottom or top of the deck with the "B" and "T" buttons. Resize the deck using the resize box in the upper right.

The second banner line displays the URL of the document at the top of the deck. The "H" button copies to the top document to the hotlist (i.e., the deck whose name is "HotList"), and the "D" button deletes the document from the deck. You can "tear off" a page by drag-and-dropping its URL banner into the background of the workspace, and you can move a page into a different deck by dropping its URL banner into the other deck.

The Deck menu

"Open URL..." pops up a dialog in which you may enter a URL. The document at that URL is placed in the deck.

"Goto Page..." displays a browser with the titles of all pages in the deck, and allows you to cause the deck to display a selected page.

"Rename Deck" pops up a dialog in which you my enter a new name for the deck.

"Gather Up" gathers all the deck's "tear-off" documents back into the deck.

"Delete Deck" deletes the deck.

"Reload" refetches the displayed document, bypassing any and all caches.

"Duplicate" makes a duplicate copy of the displayed document, and inserts the duplicate into the deck.

"Expand One Level" makes a new deck containing the documents generated by following all of the links in the displayed document. This command is quite cool. The pages will appear without images; just reload the page to get the image.

The Tear-Off Page menu

"Back To Deck" sends the displayed document back to its home deck.

"Make New Deck" makes a new deck from the displayed document.

"Reload", "Duplicate", and "Expand One Level" are the same as a page that is not torn off.