# Setting Galeon Preferences

Galeon is very configurable. The preferences window is where you will find all the options available to customize your browser. You can open it by clicking the Preferences... item in the Settings menu. On the left side, there is a listing of several different categories of options. You can expand and hide the listings of subcategories by clicking on the category buttons. When you click a subcategory, its page will be displayed in the window.

## Browsing

### General

Home Page

- When Galeon first starts up, it will automatically load the page specified here. Type an address into the entry bar or, if you are currently viewing a page you would like to set as your permanent home page, click the Set to Current button. You can also elect to make the "My Portal" page your home page by checking the Set to "My Portal" button.

On Startup

- When opening the initial browser window, you can have a page loaded automatically. You can choose to open your home page, the page you last viewed, or a blank page.

On New Page

- When opening a new, additional window, you can have a page loaded automatically. You can choose to open your home page, the page you last viewed, or a blank page.

Exit

- If the Always save session at exit button is checked, your session will always be saved when you exit Galeon.

### Bookmarks

When Adding Bookmarks

- When you add a normal bookmark, you can choose to have the bookmark name set to the page title or you can choose the name yourself. If you select the Ask user for a title option, Galeon will display a dialog for you to type the desired name into when adding bookmarks.

Show Folder Actions

- Here, you can control whether bookmark-editing functions will be displayed at the top or the bottom of each bookmark menu, or only in a context menu accessible by right-clicking on the menu.

AutoBookmarks

- The auto bookmarking feature can be enabled here. You can also set how many bookmarks you want to be automatically generated. If you choose to have your AutoBookmarks displayed in a button toolbar, it may be useful to shorten the titles of the bookmarks so they will fit within the toolbar. You can also set the maximum number of characters in an AutoBookmark title.

Smart Bookmarks

- Smart bookmarks are described in bookmarks-smart-bookmarks. The Enable history checkbox controls whether previous search items are stored in the drop-down list, and the Show "go to" button checkbox controls whether a button that performs the search is added to the right of the entry box. The Clear smart bookmarks after use checkbox controls whether the entry fields should be cleared after a search is performed. You can also control the width of the entry box created for a smart bookmark on the toolbar by adjusting the Default entry width control. As you adjust the width, the example entry box will change width to show you what the entry will look like on the toolbar.

### History

History

- Galeon keeps a record of all your previously visited URLs. You can set how many days you want to keep these items in your history. After the specified number of days, a history item will be deleted. If you wish to immediately delete all items in your browsing history, click the Clear History button.

Completions

- The location entry bar and the open URL dialog support autocompletion of typed URLs. The autocompletion routine will search your history for a possible match to the characters being typed in. If autocompletion is enabled, the best current match will be automatically filled in as you type. You can also select the order in which you'd like the URLs used for autocompletion to be sorted.

## User Interface

### Tabs

Tabbed Browsing

- Galeon operates in a "hybrid" browsing mode. Each browser window contains a notebook which itself can display multiple pages. You can find more information about this feature in tabbed-browsing.

  The Open in tabs by default option causes middle-clicked links to open in new tabs, rather than new windows. The Jump to new tabs automatically option causes Galeon to automatically switch to newly created tabs. The Display close buttons on tabs option controls whether small "X" buttons allowing you to quickly close each tab should be displayed. The Always show tabs option causes the tab listing to be shown even when only one tab exists in the window.

  The Open popups in tabs option causes popup windows opened by pages to appear in tabs, rather than in new windows. The Insert new tabs after current tab option causes new tabs to appear after the current tab in the tab listing, rather than before. The Insensitive close buttons option controls whether the close buttons on non-active tabs should be made insensitive, to prevent you from accidentally clicking them. The Tabs appear along dropdown list allows selection of the location where the tabs will be listed.

Tab Names

- Use the Shorten names to target length spinbutton to set the maximum tab name length, in characters. Alternately, the Shorten names to fixed width spinbutton can be used to set a fixed size for the width of each tab.

  By default, Galeon will simply drop words from the end of the page title if it is too long to fit in the desired space. There are also several other (currently English-centric) title shortening strategies available.

  You can choose to shorten names by looking for common separators, dropping vowels, or dropping common prefixes. The first option will look for a separator such as `-`, `:`, etc. and drop anything after that. The second option will compress words by removing vowels from them. For example, `Slashdot` might become `Slshdt`. This allows much more of the title to fit within the tab, while still remaining readable most of the time. The last option searches for common prefixes like `Welcome to` or `My` and drops them from the title.

Tab Colors

- Here, you can select the colors that will be used for the text on tabs whose pages are still being loaded, and on tabs that have finished loading but have not yet been viewed.

### Windows

Default Layout

- This controls what elements are displayed by default.

  If the Keep fullscreen window above all other windows checkbox is activated, in fullscreen mode the browser window will be raised above all other windows on your desktop, including the GNOME panel. If this checkbox is deactivated, in fullscreen mode other applications will be able to cover the browser window.

Default Dock

- Here, you can control which docked items are displayed when a new window is opened.

### Toolbars

Toolbar Appearance

- The toolbar buttons can also be shown as icons, as text, or as both, in configurations with the text under or to the right of the icons. The location entry bar can be shown on same toolbar as the navigation buttons or it can be shown on its own separate toolbar.

Toolbar Controls

- Here, you can control which items are contained in Galeon's toolbar, and the order in which they are displayed. The list on the left, Current Controls, lists the items in the toolbar, while the one on the right, Available Controls, lists items not in the toolbar. To move an item into the toolbar, select it in the Available Controls list and click the button containing a left arrow, or double-click it. To remove an item from the toolbar, select it in the Current Controls list and click the button containing a right arrow, or double-click it. Items in the Current Controls list can be reordered, either by dragging them to a new position or by selecting one and clicking the buttons with up or down arrows. The various toolbar controls are described in toolbar.

Toolbar Theme

- The style of icons that are used for the toolbar buttons can be selected here. To get more themes, visit http://galeon.sourceforge.net/themes.

Spinner

- A graphical list of all spinners installed on your system is displayed. Click on an icon to select it as the spinner you wish to have displayed on your main toolbar. If you'd like to browse to a spinner animation that is in a different location on your system than the default, you can browse to its folder.

### Mouse

Mouse buttons

- When you click on a link with the middle mouse button, the link will be opened in a new window or tab. Middle-button clicks elsewhere in the browser window, though, can be configured to show a menu containing all your bookmarks, to load a URL contained in the clipboard, or to do nothing. The second option allows you to highlight a URL in, for example, a terminal window and then simply middle click in the browser window to load the URL.

Mouse wheel

- By default, the mouse wheel scrolls by 1 line. This can be customized within the range of 1 to 100 lines.

## Handlers

### Downloading

Downloader

- Here, you can configure how Galeon handles downloadable files. You can choose to use the built-in downloader, the GNOME Transfer Manager (GTM), or an external program called by a command. If you use an external program, you can also choose to run the command inside of a terminal. The string `%s` inside of the command will be replaced with the URL of the file to be downloaded. Likewise `%f` will be replaced with the destination folder. Commands for several common programs are included in the drop-down list.

  #### Auto download and GTM

  If you are using GTM to transfer files, you'll also need to configure GTM to get auto download working. Launch GTM and select the Auto tab in its preferences dialog. The Interface to connect: option must be set to the correct interface for auto download to work. If you are unsure which interface you are using, type `ifconfig` in a terminal window and look at the output. If you are using a modem, you are likely using "ppp0". If you are using an ethernet connection (this includes cable modems and DSL), you are likely using "eth0".

Options

- In this section, you can set some basic options controlling Galeon's behavior with regard to downloading files via HTTP. You can select whether you would like to be prompted for a location to save the file to every time, and the directory that will be used as a default.

FTP

- In this section, you can specify how Galeon should handle "ftp://" links. You can choose to use either Galeon's built-in FTP handler or the external handler that is specified in the GNOME Control Center. For more information on configuring your GNOME URL handlers, consult prefs-GNOME-URL-handlers.

### Programs

View source

- Here, you can select whether HTML source code will be viewed within a Galeon browser window or in an external program.

Mailer

- The default mailer for mailto: URLs can be specified here. To support legacy mail clients, the following options are available:

  - `%t` To
  - `%c` Cc
  - `%b` Bcc
  - `%k` Reference
  - `%w` News Host
  - `%n` News Group
  - `%p` Priority
  - `%a` Attachment
  - `%e` Reference
  - `%h` Html
  - `%y` Body
  - `%s` Subject
  - `%r` Reply
  - `%o` Follow up
  - For example: `mutt [-c %c] [-b %b] [-s %s] [-t %t]`

Help

- This setting controls whether Galeon will be used when viewing GNOME help documents.

### MIME Types

MIME Types

- This section controls what Galeon will do when encountering different types of files. Galeon will use the list displayed here to determine what course of action should be taken with files with different MIME types. You can add and delete MIME types here and modify the action that will be performed for each.

## Rendering

### Fonts/Colors

Fonts

- In this section, you can customize the fonts that the Mozilla rendering engine will use when displaying pages in Galeon. If the Always use these fonts button is checked, these fonts will be used on all pages; otherwise, they will only be used by pages that do not specify their own fonts. The font sizes selected in the dialog boxes opened by the Serif and Monospace buttons determine the default sizes for all variable- and fixed-width fonts, respectively. The Min. Size spinbutton allows you to specify the minimum point size for fonts that are displayed. The default font type, either Serif or Sans Serif, can be selected. All of these options can be set for each of the encodings listed in the Language encoding box.

  #### Tip

  Make sure you select the appropriate character set in the font browsers for the language that you're using (`iso8859-1` for Western European languages)! If you don't, your settings may be ignored.

Colors

- Here, you can select the default colors that will be used for the background, text, and unvisited and visited links of web pages that don't define their own colors. You can also choose whether you'd like these colors to be used for all pages, and whether you'd like links to be underlined or not.

Stylesheet

- Here, you can select stylesheets that will be used by default for all pages.

### Languages

Charsets

- You can select the default character set that will be used for text here, and whether this setting should be autodetected.

Languages

- This section lets you manage the languages that Galeon is capable of displaying.

## Advanced

### Network

Protocol

- You can choose either HTTP version 1.0 or 1.1. Some proxy software, (e.g. Junkbuster) requires the older HTTP version 1.0 to function correctly.

Proxies

- If you use proxies for the HTTP, SSL, or FTP protocols, enter their information here and check the Enable proxy button. You can also give a list of sites for which the proxies will not be used, and enable the use of proxy keep-alive, if necessary. If your network is set up appropriately, it is also possible to automatically get the correct proxy configuration here.

### Filtering

Filtering

- Many pages contain HTML or JavaScript code that will open new browser windows. You can prevent these popup windows from being opened by unchecking the Allow popups button. If you have a Java plugin installed, you can enable or disable it here. You can also control whether any other plugins will be used.

JavaScript

- You can enable or disable the execution of JavaScript code here. Unchecking the Allow statusbar messages button prevents pages from changing the text in the statusbar.

Image loading

- When images are present in a page, you can choose to always load them, load them only if they come from the current server, or never load them. Images for banner ads are usually loaded from a different server than the page you are viewing, so selecting "Load from current server only" will often block these banner ads from displaying. To open the Image Sites page of the Persistent Data Manager, allowing you to block images from specific sites, click the Image Sites... button.

### Persistent Data

Cookies

- You can choose to accept all cookies, accept cookies from the current server only, or to not accept any cookies. If you want to be notified when a site attempts to store a cookie on your computer, select the Warn before accepting a cookie checkbox.

  Clicking the Cookies... or Cookie Sites... buttons will open the corresponding pages of the Persistent Data Manager, allowing you to manage the cookies that are being stored and the site-specific cookie policies.

Passwords

- Galeon can automatically remember username/password combinations that you enter. To enable this functionality, check the Remember passwords for sites that require logins button.

  Clicking the Passwords... or Password Sites... buttons will open the corresponding pages of the Persistent Data Manager, allowing you to manage the username/password combinations that are being stored and the listing of sites for which combinations should not be stored.

Cache

- The disk cache stores a local copy of pages and images you have viewed on your hard drive, in order to make browsing of pages that you've already visited faster. The memory cache does the same thing, but in your RAM. You can set how often items in the cache and their actual versions on the network should be compared, and how much space you want the caches to use. If you would like to delete all stored items, click the Clear disk cache and Clear memory cache buttons.

## Configuring the GNOME URL handlers

Galeon uses the program specified by GNOME to handle the "mailto" protocol. Galeon will also use the "ftp" protocol handler specified by your GNOME settings if you have elected to use an external FTP handler (described in prefs-handlers-downloading).

To set your GNOME "mailto" and "ftp" handlers, first launch the GNOME Control Center. Click on Document Handlers URL Handlers . Look in the column labeled "Protocol". If you have an item labeled "mailto" or "ftp", you can click on it and edit the text entry field to the right of the handler: label. If, for example, you want to use Balsa to handle "mailto" links, enter `balsa -m "%s"` in this field. The "%s" parameter will be replaced with the email address specified in the "mailto" link. After you have entered this information, click the Set button. If desired, do the same for the "ftp" protocol. If there is no "mailto" or "ftp" handler currently set, simply enter `mailto` or `ftp` in the first text entry field, and the command that should be run in the second. After clicking the Set button, you should see the new handler in the list below. Click on the OK button to apply and save your changes.