User’s Manual

This chapter describes the additional features in rTorrent-PS, and other differences to a vanilla rTorrent build.

Additional Features

Using the right default configuration (more on that below), you will get the following additional features in your rTorrent-PS installation:

  1. The t key is bound to a trackers view that shows all items sorted by tracker and then by name.
  2. The ! key is bound to a messages view, listing all items that currently have a non-empty message, sorted in order of the message text.
  3. The ^ key is bound to the rtcontrol search result view, so you can easily return to your last search.
  4. The ? key is bound to the indemand view, which sorts all open items by their activity, with the most recently active on top.
  5. The % key is bound to the ratio view, which sorts all open items by their ratio (descending).
  6. The ° key is bound to the uploaded view, which sorts all open items by their total upload amount (descending).
  7. The " key is bound to the datasize view, which sorts all open items by the size of their content data (descending).
  8. Add even more views, see Additional Views for details.
  9. Page and Page scroll by 50 items at a time (or whatever other value ui.focus.page_size has).
  10. Home / End jump to the first / last item in the current view.
  11. Ctrl-F opens a prompt where you can enter a search term, and Shift-F or F3 jump to the next hit for that term. If nothing matches, a message is shown on the console. rt-ps-ui-find
  12. The ~ key rotates through all available color themes, or a user-selected subset. See Color Themes for details.
  13. The < and > keys rotate through all added category views (pyro.category.add=‹name›), with filtering based on the ruTorrent label (custom_1=‹name›). See Category Views for details.
  14. | reapplies the category filter and thus updates the current category view.
  15. The u key shows the uptime and some other essential data of your rTorrent instance.
  16. F2 shows some important help resources (web links) in the console log.
  17. * toggles between the collapsed (as described on Extended Canvas Explained) and the expanded display of the current view. rt-ps-canvas-v2-small
  18. / toggles the visibility of ‘sacrificial’ columns – normally, they’re only hidden when the terminal width gets too small.
  19. The active view is changed to include all incomplete items regardless of whether they have any traffic, and then groups the list into complete, incomplete, and queued items, in that order. Within each group, they’re sorted by download and then upload speed.
  20. Some canvas v2 columns are added in the pimp-my-box configuration – the selected throttle (⋉), a download’s chunk size (≣), and the expected time of arrival (⟲ ◥◤) on the active and leeching displays only. The visibility of the chunk size column can be toggled using the _ key.
  21. The commands s=«keyword», t=«tracker_alias», and f=«filter_condition» are pre-defined for searching using a Ctrl-X prompt.
  22. The . key toggles the membership in the tagged view for the item in focus, : shows the tagged view, and T clears that view (i.e. removes the tagged state on all items). This can be very useful to manually select a few items and then run rtcontrol on them, or alternatively use --to-view tagged to populate the tagged view, then deselect some items interactively with the . key, and finally mass-control the rest. See Additional Views for details.
  23. You can use the purge= and cull= commands (on a Ctrl-X prompt) for deleting the current item and its (incomplete) data.
  24. Ctrl-g shows the tags of an item (as managed by rtcontrol); tag.add=‹tag› and tag.rm=‹tag› can be used to change the set of tags, both also show the new set of tags after changing them.
  25. Time-stamped log files with rotation, archival (compression), and pruning – with a setting for the number of days to keep logs in uncompressed form, or at all.
  26. Trackers are scraped regularly (active items relatively often, inactive items including closed ones seldomly), so that the display of downloads / seeders / leechers is not totally outdated. The & key can be used to manually scrape the item in focus.
  27. A watchdog for the pyrotorque daemon process (checks every 5 minutes, and starts it when not running if the ~/.pyroscope/run/pyrotorque file exists).

With regards to using the ‘right’ configuration to get the above, you need the *.rc.default files in the ~/.pyroscope/rtorrent.d directory provided by pyrocore. Standard Configuration Explained has details on these. Some more features are defined by the pimp-my-box configuration templates.

To get there, perform the Manual Turn-Key System Setup as described in this manual, or use the pimp-my-box project for an automatic remote installation. The instructions in the Extending your ‘.rtorrent.rc’ section of the pyrocore manual only cover half of it, and you might miss some described features.

Extended Canvas Explained

The following is an explanation of the collapsed display of rTorrent-PS (canvas v2).

Extended Canvas Screenshot

Extended Canvas Screenshot

In case your screen looks broken compared to this, see Setting up Your Terminal Emulator for necessary pre-conditions and settings regarding your terminal emulator application and operating system.

In older builds, you need to remember to press the * key while showing a view, or change the state of new views after adding them (by calling the view.collapsed.toggle command), else you won’t ever see it.

The following is an overview of the default columns, and what the values and icons in them mean.

A after the column title indicates a ‘sacrificial’ column, which disappear when the display gets too narrow to display all the columns. When even that does not provide enough space, columns are omitted beginning on the right side (Name is always included). Sacrificial columns can also be toggled using the / key – note they’re toggled as a whole group, so other dynamic states like the column toggle are ignored.

Columns marked are provided by a pimp-my-box configuration include (i.e. loaded from ~/rtorrent/rtorrent.d/), and ones carrying by pyrocore (from ~/.pyroscope/rtorrent.d/). All others are built-in.

Message or alert indicator (♺ = Tracker cycle complete, i.e. “Tried all trackers”; ʘ = item’s data path does not exist (needs support by a cron job); ⚡ = establishing connection; ↯ = data transfer problem; ◔ = timeout; ¿? = unknown torrent / info hash; ⨂ = authorization problem (possibly temporary); ⋫ = tracker downtime; ☡ = DNS problems; ⚠ = other)
Item state (▹ = started, ╍ = paused, ▪ = stopped)
Tied item? [⚯]
Command lock-out? (⚒ = heed commands, ◌ = ignore commands)
Number of completions from last scrape info
Number of seeds from last scrape info
Number of leeches from last scrape info
Transfer direction indicator [⇅ ↡ ↟]
Number of connected peers
∆⋮ ⟲
Upload rate, or when inactive, time the download took (only after completion).
∇⋮ ◷
Approximate time since completion (units are «”’hdwmy» from seconds to years); for incomplete items the download rate or, if there’s no traffic, the time since the item was started or loaded
⟲ ◥◤
Expected time of arrival (only on the active and leeching views)
Throttle selected for this item (∞ is the special NULL throttle; ⓪…⑨ for ruTorrent‘s thr_0…9 channels)
Σ⇈
Total sum of uploaded data
Completion status (✔ = done; else up to 8 dots [⣿] and ❚, i.e. progress in 10% steps); the old ui.style.progress.set command is deprecated, see Defining Your Own Columns for the new way to get a different set of glyphs or an ASCII version
Ratio (☹ plus color indication for < 1, ➀ — ➉ : >= the number, ⊛ : >= 11); the old ui.style.ratio.set command is deprecated, see Defining Your Own Columns for the new way to get a different set of number glyphs or an ASCII version
☯ ‰
Detailed ratio, in promille and as a number (only on the ratio view).
Data size
Chunk size – this column can be toggled on / off using the _ key
◷ ↑↓
Time of last data transfer (only on the last_xfer view).
◷ ↺⤴⤵
Time of last tracker scrape (only on the trackers view).
Domain
15 characters of the unmapped tracker domain name (only on the trackers view).
◷ ℞
Time a peer was last connected, or the number of peers connected right now (only on the indemand view).
Priority (✖ = off, ⇣ = low, nothing for normal, ⇡ = high)
A ⚑ indicates this item is on the tagged view
Name
Name of the download item – either the name contained in the metafile, or else the value of the displayname custom field when set on an item
Tracker
Domain of the first HTTP tracker with seeds or leeches, or else the first one altogether – note that you can define nicer aliases using the trackers.alias.set_key command in your configuration

For the various time displays to work, you need the pyrocore standard configuration for rtorrent.rc.

The scrape info and peer numbers are exact only for values below 100, else they indicate the order of magnitude using roman numerals (c = 10², m = 10³, X = 10⁴, C = 10⁵, M = 10⁶). For up-to-date scrape info, you need the Tracker Auto-Scraping configuration from pyrocore.

Command Extensions

The following new commands are available. Note that the links point to the Commands Reference chapter in the rTorrent Handbook.

math.* Commands

string.* Commands

convert.* Commands

system.* Commands

d.* Commands

network.* Commands

ui.* Commands

Other Commands