The tips feature provides a random usage tip every time you start-up xmlterm. Click on the New Tip link to the left, if you would like a new tip. Click on the Explain Tip link to the right, for more information on the tip. Set user Level to advanced to turn off tips.

The level setting is a measure of the user's familiarity with XMLterm features. The beginner setting can produce a lot of help information. The intermediate setting produces less information, and advanced setting produces virtually none.

The icons preference setting determines whether icons should be used in XMLterm. If enabled, the prompt becomes an icon and directory listings become a GUI-style table of icons. This can use up a lot of screen space and slow things down on older computers.

The windows preference setting determines whether double-clicking icons etc. executes commands in a new window (as in a GUI) or in the same window (as in a CLI).

The browser interface uses one-click activation of commands whereas many GUIs use one-click selection and double-click activation. Since XMLterm has browser and GUI features, it can get a bit confusing. The rules are: Single click any explicit underlined hyperlink, browser-style. Any highlighted implicit hyperlink needs to be double clicked for activation, with the exception of the command prompt!

Clicking on the command prompt expands/collapses the output associated with a command. An underlined prompt denotes the collapsed state. You can even click the prompt before you type the command, which would hide the output of the command! To hide the output of all commands, use the F1 (or ctl-Home) shortcut key. Any string, plain text or HTML, may be used as the command prompt, by typing js:SetPrompt('string') in the command line. This means that you can use any image as a prompt, through the IMG element. The prompt can even be an animated GIF!

Double-clicking on any prior command line re-executes the command. This is similar to the facility provided by many shells for repeating commands.

Typing js:statement in the command line executes any valid Javascript statement in the context of the XMLterm window and displays its output. The Javascript code may produce a HTML fragment as its output, which is then appended to the XMLterm page.

The following full-screen commands appear to work with XMLTerm: less, vi, emacs -nw, man, and pine. more does not work at the moment; settle for less instead! The XMLterm full screen implementation actually uses a bunch of PRE elements, one for each row.

xls directory1 file2 ... lists directory contents, analogous to the Unix ls command. Double-clicking on a directory name makes it the current working directory and displays its contents. Double-clicking on an executable file or script executes it in the current directory. Double-clicking on other files runs the xcat command on the file. Set Icons setting to on to enable iconic directory listing.

xcat file1 file2 ... displays files, analogous to the Unix cat command. With xcat, you can use URLs instead of filenames! Image files or URLs (GIF/PNG/JPEG) are rendered inline, providing a cool way to browse images HTML files or URLs are displayed in an inline frame. The frame height, in pixels, may be specified using the -h option. Text files are displayed with any embedded URLs highlighted (and clickable).