Basic operation

When starting dc-qt, the first thing you will see is the main window (actually it should be the configuration dialog if it's the first time you start dc-qt, but we will ignore that for now, see the configuration section for more information about that dialog). The main window is the center of the application. From here you can bring up all the other dialogs like configuration, connection, searching and online help (you obviously found this). Let us have a look at the main window:

In the top is the menubar. From here all the basic commands of dc-qt are reachable. Below is the toolbar, which contains the actions that we thought would be the most used ones.

Below the toolbar is a row of hub tabs. As you can see, only one tab is open from the beginning. Since no connection has been made, no name has been given to the hub tab yet.

Below the hub tabs is another row of tabs related to the currently selected hub. The first tab displays the public chat of that hub. The next one is the list of users connected to the hub. When connected, you can use this tab to get some information about each user, for example how much a user is sharing, retrieve a users file list, or start a private chat session. Private chat tabs are added after the "users" tab.

When a chat tab is selected, public or private, a message can be entered in the text field below the chat window by typing something into it and pressing enter. A private chat tab can also be closed by pressing the red button marked "X" in the top right corner of the chat tab.

Below all this is the transfer window, separated from the rest of the layout with a splitter bar, so that you can give it more or less of the availible space. The transfer window is explained in detail in the section searching and downloading.

This is it. If you haven't configured dc-qt yet, do so now by reading the section configuration. Otherwise, read connecting to a hub to get you going.


home