2.5.1  Menus

The menus on a Monotone Browser window largely provide an alternative means of accessing the functions provided by the tool-bar buttons. For example the File → Open menu option does exactly the same thing as the Open tool-bar button. As the tool-bar buttons are discussed in the next section, I will not bother to elaborate on their menu counterparts here. However there are a few extra menu options that do not appear anywhere else:

  • File → New Blank - Displays a new Monotone Browser window but in its closed state rather than initially duplicating the contents of the existing window. This is particularly useful if the first thing you are going to do is to open a completely different database.

  • File → Open Recent - Presents the user with a menu from which they can select a database to open. Up to ten of the most recently accessed Monotone databases are stored in this menu.

  • File → Connect To Server - Presents the user with a remote Monotone server bookmark menu from which they can select a server to connect to. There is also the Manage Server Bookmarks menu option for managing these bookmarks (see Section 7.2).

  • File → Quit - This completely quits out of the application regardless of what windows you may have open. Normally the application only exits when all of its Monotone Browser windows have been closed.

  • Edit → Windows → Remember Sizes - Saves the dimensions of not only current but also previously displayed windows (including some dialog windows). Newly displayed windows will be sized according to those saved dimensions.

  • Edit → Windows → Reset Sizes - Removes all information regarding saved window dimensions, causing newly displayed windows to revert to their original sizes.

  • View → File Encoding - Allows the user to select the character encoding for the files that they are going to display in Monotone Browser. The most popular encodings are listed first but there is also the All Encodings submenu containing all of the encodings known to your system. The default character encoding used by Monotone Browser is UTF-8.

  • Tools → Choose Authentication Key - Allows the user to select the local authentication key that is to be used when connecting to remote Monotone servers. This menu is only useful if you happen to have more than one local authentication key, which is not usually the case. The Unspecified menu option can be used to reinstate the default behaviour where Monotone is not told which authentication key to use.

  • Tools → Compare Arbitrary Revisions - Displays a Compare Arbitrary Revisions window that allows the user to compare any two revisions in the database (see Section 5.3).

  • Tools → Compare Workspace - Performs a revision comparison between the current contents of the workspace and the revision upon which it is based (see Section 5.2). This menu option is only available if Monotone Browser was started within a workspace.

  • Help → Help On Window - Displays the relevant section in the Monotone Browser manual for the current window.

  • Help → Context Help - This puts the application into a context sensitive help mode where one can select a specific widget on a window and display the relevant section in the Monotone Browser manual for that widget or group of widgets.

  • Help → Home Page - Displays the home page for the Monotone Browser application.

  • Help → About - Displays the obligatory About window that nurses the ego of the author and rightly mentions those people kind enough to contribute their time and effort to this project.

  1. The keyboard shortcuts shown against the Help menu options work on nearly all Monotone Browser windows.

  2. The File → Connect To Server submenu is only available if your version of Monotone supports this feature.

  3. Connecting to a Monotone server over a network is not only slower but also has no support for doing file annotations.