Chapter 2. Frequently Asked Questions

Table of Contents

I rebuilt/upgraded/reconfigured my ELinks, restarted it, but it looks nothing has changed!
How does cutting and pasting work?
How does the "Move" button on the bookmark manager work?
What's up with the navigation in the various managers?
Why are there so many Links flavors?
Which one to use?
What are the Ki (kibi) and Mi (mebi) units?
Why are stable releases made at christmas?
How can I get 256 colours?
What User-Agent header does ELinks send?

This is an attempt to capture some of the questions that appear once in a while on the mailing list.

I rebuilt/upgraded/reconfigured my ELinks, restarted it, but it looks nothing has changed!

ELinks instances connect together so that they share the cache, bookmarks, cookies, configuration, etc. Only the "master" ELinks instance does any real work and any other ELinkses you run will only connect to this instance. So when you want to restart ELinks, make sure you have no other ELinks instances running at the time.

Alternatively, you can use the -no-connect parameter to make the ELinks always run standalone, or create a parallel group of ELinks instances by the -session-ring N parameter (where N is a number larger than zero); however, be aware of the fact that in those cases ELinks won't touch any configuration, bookmark, cookies, etc files - you can force that by the -touch-files parameter, however beware - this can result in a data loss! (E.g., when two master ELinks instances will try to save their bookmarks and you add a bookmark to each of those, only one of the bookmarks survives.)