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Quick start

Five minutes, from a built binary to a torrent downloading in the background.

Add something

torrnado add 'magnet:?xt=urn:btih:...'

Quote the magnet

In zsh the ? and & in a magnet URI are glob and job-control characters. Quote it, or the shell mangles it before torrnado ever sees it. In the TUI's :add the quotes are harmless but unnecessary.

There was no daemon running, so that command started one and left it running. It is still there after the command exits - that is the whole point of the design.

add takes more than magnets: a .torrent file, an http(s) URL to one, a directory, a glob, or a file listing magnets one per line. See batch add.

Watch it

torrnado list          # a snapshot
torrnado list --watch  # redrawn until you interrupt it

Or open the interface:

torrnado

Six keys to know

Key Does
J / K move down / up
Space mark a torrent (actions apply to marks, else the cursor row)
P pause or resume
: the command palette - :add, :theme, :limit-down 2M
H every other key, generated from your live keymap
Q quit - the daemon keeps running

Try a theme

Press : and type theme. The picker floats over the panes and recolors the interface as you move through it, so you judge a theme on your own torrents. Enter keeps it, Esc puts back the one you started with.

Leave it running

Quitting the TUI does not stop anything. To actually stop the daemon:

torrnado status     # is one running, and what is it doing
torrnado stop       # and shut it down

stop waits until the daemon has saved its session and closed cleanly. It finds the daemon by the lock it holds rather than by process name, so it works whatever the binary is called. More in The daemon.

Worth saying once: a daemon that is still seeding is a normal state to leave a machine in, so this is not a thing to run out of habit.

Where things went

torrnado config

prints the config file it reads, the download and state directories, the socket path, and every setting in effect. It works whether or not a daemon is running.

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