Wherever You Go . . .

To move from directory to directory, you can simply click on an icon, whether in the right tree view or in the left expanded view. You can also move the directory tree around by using your cursor keys. You'll see the highlight bar move from directory to directory. To see the contents in the main window, move to a folder and press <Enter>. To go up a level in the directory tree (rather than folder by folder), press <Alt+Up Arrow>. Substituting the down arrow for the up arrow will take you to the other directory.

There's another way, as well. If you look up at the menu bar, you'll see an up arrow, a left-pointing arrow, and a right-pointing arrow (Figure 5-3). Right next to that is an icon of a house. Clicking that house icon will always take you back to your personal home directory. Clicking the up arrow will move you up the directory tree, and the left arrow will take you back to whatever directory you were last visiting.

The quickest way to navigate your file system (assuming you know the directory you want to be in) is simply to type it in the location bar. Clicking that little X on the black arrow to the left of the location bar (where it says "Location") will clear the field. That saves you having to select the text and erase it. From here, you can just type in whatever you want there, e.g., /home/marcel.

Navigating the Navigation Panel

We should spend a couple of minutes looking at that navigation panel (the left side panel you open and close with <F9>) because it is quite important. You've already seen how to use it to navigate your file system, but wait (as they say on television), there's more. Look at those tabs on the right side of the navigation panel. If you move your mouse over any of them, the tooltips will identify them. Click on them, and you'll switch to whatever view they offer. Click on them again, and the navigation panel will slam shut, leaving only the tabs behind and giving you more viewing space in the main Konqueror window.

Now, about those tabs . . . The first is a bookmark tab. When we talk about using Konqueror as a Web browser later in the book, you'll be using the bookmark feature a lot. For now, you should probably know that you can bookmark locations on disk. If you use a particular directory a lot (your music collection, for example), you'll want to bookmark that for easy access. You can also get to the bookmarks (or add them) by clicking Bookmarks on the menu bar.

After the bookmark tab, you'll see the history tab. Clicking it will show you a tree view listing various places on your disk (files and directories) or sites you've visited recently.

The tab with a house on it is a direct link to your personal home directory. Next to it is the KDE media player tab. You'll recognize it by the image of a little blue speaker with what appears to be music pouring out. We'll cover that later when we talk about multimedia. Below that is an icon with a globe of the Earth. That's the network tab. The network tab provides you with a quick link to the KDE download areas (FTP sites) and Web pages. For these to work, you must be connected to the Internet. This is another area that we will cover later in the book.

The second-to-last tab accesses your system's root directory, as discussed earlier in this chapter. That leaves only one tab, the services tab. This tab lets you zoom in on network services, such as printers or shared directories on other machines or your local CD-ROM device for playing audio tracks. Once again, this is something we will discuss later in the book. For the moment, I just wanted you to get a feel for what's there when you open Konqueror.