And most important, you can quit the program with CTRL+Q. That can be useful if you’ve got 10 or 12 torrents running at a time, and you want a clear list of finished torrents, or stopped torrents. If you take a few moments to experiment, you’ll find that pressing the numbers 1-6 gives you a revised view, with different filters applied. If you’re used to capping your bandwidth (I choke my upload speeds to keep my wireless router from having a nervous breakdown), try using the a-s-d, A-S-D, z-x-c and Z-X-C keys to trim the speed to your liking. Bandwidth throttling might be important to you too. To get back to the main list, use the left arrow. Press the right arrow while a torrent is highlighted, to see a detailed breakdown of the information available. There are some customary points that you’d expect from a torrent client. The torrent is marked as active, the tracker will be contacted, and provided there are adequate seeds, downloading will start.
Use the arrow up and down keys to highlight the torrent (it will be marked with a bar of asterisks) and press CTRL+S. Note that it’s still labeled as “INACTIVE.” rtorrent won’t start downloading until you tell it to. Press enter when you’ve found the one you want, and rtorrent will add it to the list.
Your path starts in your home directory (unless you started it in a lower directory than that), so you don’t have to give it the full root path if you don’t want to. Double-tab shows a list of available path options that match the path you’ve already started. You can use tab completion to make your way to it.
I can’t guarantee you’ll like it, but it’s a free and legal download and it makes for a good example. In this example, I’m using one of my favorite Revolution Void albums, “ Increase the Dosage,” from Jamendo. To add a torrent, press return and navigate to the torrent file. Like a lot of console-driven programs, the startup screen for rtorrent is … rather dry. rtorrent is an amazing, complex, powerful program that is at the same time sleek, clean, comprehensive and ultralight - and I’m giving you just one small idea of its potential.īut first, let’s scratch the surface. This time, instead of introducing you to rtorrent nice and easy, like I did with cplay, I’m going to give you a brief tour, and then I’ll show you something very cool you can do with it. I can’t imagine why anyone would use anything else, unless there’s something funky the big-name programs can do, that rtorrent just doesn’t handle yet.