Reading and moving around¶

Noctiluca shows a page in one of two views, and you move through it with keys. This page covers the views, scrolling, link hints, find, history, bookmarks and the F1 overlay. The keys here are the default vim set; Going places and keys has the plain set too.

The projection¶

The projection is the default view. Chrome lays the page out at your terminal's size (each cell stands for 8 by 18 CSS pixels), and Noctiluca puts each box of text at Chrome's place for it, snapped to cells, with its text rewrapped to its width. A column that grows pushes down what is under it, never what is beside it, so two-column and flex layouts stay side by side.

A two-column page	An article with a header, a figure and an aside

In the projection, controls show as faces: [Ada_] for a field, [ ] Send news for a check box, ‹First mirror ▾› for a select, [ Send ] for a button. Use one with its link hint. Images, videos, canvases and frames show as a placeholder box with their alt text.

This first projection is rough. It has no fixed or sticky layer and no paint order, so a page with a sticky header or overlapping boxes can read oddly. Reader mode is one key away.

Reader mode¶

Press r to switch between the projection and reader mode, or start in it with --reader. Reader mode drops the layout and keeps the content, in reading order, in one column: headings, paragraphs, nested lists, quotes, code, tables, images and the page's controls. Text the page hides is left out.

In reader mode, a page's controls are live intuiTUIve widgets in the column (see Forms and controls), still images are drawn as pictures (see Pictures, video and sound), and each video and audio gets play, mute and volume controls.

A site's config table can choose its view (view = "reader"), so a site you always read opens in reader mode. See Configuration.

There is a third view, --raster: the page as Chrome paints it, in half blocks. It is for debugging, has its own address bar, and quits with Ctrl+Q. r does not switch to it.

Scrolling¶

Both text views build only the rows near the screen, so a long page scrolls as fast as a short one, with no row limit. Chrome's own scroll follows yours: a few rows move it by a turn of the wheel, a jump (G, g g, find) by a scroll to the place. So a page's lazy images load and an infinite feed keeps loading. Near the end of what was read, Noctiluca scrolls Chrome to its bottom and reads the page again once it changes. When the page grows above what you are reading, your place stays put.

Pictures load as you reach them, as in a browser, and a picture partly on screen shows the part in view (Sixel and iTerm2 included).

A page too long to read whole (more than 20,000 blocks) says "page cut" in the status line.

Link hints¶

Press f. Every link and every control on the page that is not disabled gets a short label of home-row letters. Type a label to use it:

• a link, a button, a check box, a switch, a radio, a tab or a menu item is clicked, with a real mouse click in Chrome;
• a field, a select or a slider gets its widget: focused in reader mode, or in a box over the page in the projection (Esc closes the box).

A click with the mouse on a link or a control does the same as its label. A click on a picture, a canvas, a drawing or a frame is sent to the page at that point of it, so a map or a game in a <canvas> gets its click where you made it. In a terminal that reports the mouse in pixels (kitty, WezTerm, foot, Ghostty, xterm; see the mouse to the pixel) it lands on the exact pixel; elsewhere, on the middle of the cell. Backspace takes back a letter, and Esc puts the hints away. A letter that starts no label puts them away too, and says so.

Labels on the page	A control used from the projection

Find¶

Press /, type, and press Enter. Find looks in the text Noctiluca shows in the current view, without regard to case. It highlights every match, scrolls to the first, and the status line says "match 1 of 3". n goes to the next match and N to the previous one, round and round. / opens with your last search, so Enter on it searches again. An empty search clears it.

History¶

H goes back and L goes forward. The arrows at the left of the address line are dim when there is nowhere to go. R reloads the page.

Bookmarks¶

m bookmarks this page: its address and title. M lists your bookmarks: ↑ and ↓ (or k and j) move, Enter opens one, d removes it, Esc closes the list.

Bookmarks live in bookmarks.toml in Noctiluca's data directory (~/.local/share/noctiluca on Linux, or $XDG_DATA_HOME/noctiluca; ~/Library/Application Support/noctiluca on macOS; %LOCALAPPDATA%\noctiluca on Windows). Each is a [[bookmark]] with a url, a title and, if you add one by hand, a keyword:

[[bookmark]]
url = "https://docs.rs/serde"
title = "serde - Rust"
keyword = "sd"            # `sd` in the address bar opens it

A bookmark keyword works like a shortcut: with {} in its address, the words after it fill it in.

Tabs¶

There is one tab for now. The tab actions (O, g t, g T) are in the list, but say "One tab for now" when you run them. Tabs need several pages in rs-rich-embed, which is still to come.

The F1 overlay¶

Press F1 for every action, with the keys that run it. Type to narrow the list, ↑ and ↓ to move, Enter to run one, Esc to close it.

The list is live. An action that cannot run now shows why: "Nothing to go back to.", "Find something first.", "No video or audio on this page.". The media actions say what they would do now ("Pause the media"). A key rebound in the config shows here at once, and this site's own keys come first, marked with the site table they came from.