Options Tab

General Options

• Primary zoom method

  The primary zoom method specifies the behaviour of the standard zoom adjustment shortcuts (ctrl-plus, ctrl-minus, ctrl-mousewheel). With Full Page Zoom, both images and text will be zoomed; with Text Zoom, only text is zoomed. Whichever zoom method is not set to be primary is referred to as the secondary method.

  The shift key can be added to any of the shortcuts to control the secondary zoom method. For example, if the primary zoom method is set to Full Page Zoom, and ctrl-shift-plus is pressed, only text size will be increased.

  Default primary zoom level

  This is the zoom level of the primary zoom method as applied to all pages by default. A value of 100% is the standard Firefox zoom level without NoSquint. With NoSquint, you can override this value to be larger or smaller.

  Modifying the zoom when visiting a web page will override this value for that site.

• Zoom increment

  You can change the zoom level for a page from the View menu, by using one of the zoom shortcuts (ctrl-plus/minus or ctrl-mousewheel), or by using the optional toolbar buttons. NoSquint can remember these changes. This setting specifies what increment, in percent, to use when changing the zoom level.

• Enable zoom with ctrl-mousewheel

  Selecting this option allows you to adjust the zoom level by pressing and holding the control key while moving the mousewheel up or down. If ctrl-shift-mousewheel is used, this controls the secondary zoom method.

• Show current zoom levels in status bar

  Selecting this option shows the zoom levels (both full page and text zoom) in the status bar for the current web page. When hovering over the status panel, a tooltip will appear providing more information.

Site Options

To NoSquint, a site is a web location where all pages under that location have the same zoom level, and the site name is derived from the page's URL.

In most cases, the site is the domain. For example, if the current page is www2.ibm.com/index.php, NoSquint will consider the site name to be ibm.com. NoSquint will also take into account common second-level domains. For example, if you're visiting www.bbc.co.uk, NoSquint will consider the site name to be bbc.co.uk.

The default behaviour should work almost all the time. When it doesn't, you can control how NoSquint determines site names in the Exceptions Tab.

• Remember zoom level per site

  With this option selected, NoSquint will remember any changes you make to the zoom levels for a given site. Both full page zoom and text zoom levels are remembered independently. Next time you visit that site, NoSquint will change the zoom to the levels previously used on that site.

• Forget zoom settings for sites not visited in the last ...

  With the "remember zoom levels per site" option enabled, NoSquint keeps track of all zoom level changes for sites, even sites you only visit once. This option is house cleaning: if you haven't visited a site (for which you've set a non-default zoom level) for the specified number of months, NoSquint will forget the setting.

• Use the default zoom level for all sites

  One of NoSquint's features is the ability to remember custom zoom levels for individual sites. If you're not interested this and want to use the same level for all sites, or you just don't want NoSquint to remember any manual changes, select this option.

Exceptions Tab

Because not all web sites are structured the same, sometimes the default logic NoSquint uses to determine the site name doesn't work the way you want it to. By way of exceptions, you can control how NoSquint determines what constitutes a separate site.

Use Cases

Exceptions are powerful and expressive, and unfortunately can be confusing. Before going into a detailed explanation, let's first examine some common use-cases. Hopefully one of these examples applies to your case.

1. Problem: different subdomains on SourceForge, e.g. freevo.sourceforge.net and audacity.sourceforge.net, are wrongly treated as the same site (sourceforge.net)
   Solution: add an exception with the pattern *.sourceforge.net
2. Problem: example.com/users/mary and example.com/users/john are wrongly treated as the same site (example.com)
   Solution: add an exception with the pattern example.com/users/*
3. Problem: I use Google Mail (mail.google.com) and Google Reader (google.com/reader) and would like these treated as sites separate from google.com
   Solution: add an exception with the pattern mail.google.com; add another exception with the pattern google.com/reader
4. Problem: my company's intranet is at intra.example.com, but I'd like our wiki, located under intra.example.com/wiki to be treated separately from the rest of the intranet.
   Solution: add an exception with the pattern intra.example.com/wiki
5. Problem: Google Mail, Google Groups, and in fact all hosts on Google should be treated as separate sites. But the country (the top-level domain) shouldn't matter. So mail.google.ca should be the same site as mail.google.de, but a different site from groups.google.de, which itself would be the same site as groups.google.fi
   Solution: add an exception with the pattern *.google.[*]
6. Problem: my company has several web applications that are distributed across multiple servers. example.com/server1/apps/app1 should be considered the same site as example.com/server2/apps/app1, but there could also be example.com/server1/apps/app3 that should be a separate site.
   Solution: add an exception with the pattern example.com/[*]/apps/*
7. Problem: same scenario the previous one, but sometimes the server isn't in the URL, so example.com/apps/app1 is the same site as example.com/server1/apps/app1.
   Solution: add an exception with the pattern example.com/[**]apps/*

Gory Details

What follows is a technical explanation of exceptions. If you're not an advanced user, this section may create a fair amount of confusion; refer instead to the use-cases above to follow by example.

Exception patterns may contain zero or more of the following possible wildcards:

• * – When included in the host name, matches any character except a dot ('.'). When included in the path, matches any character except a slash ('/'). Does not match the empty string.
• ** – Matches any sequence of characters. Does match the empty string.

Site names are arbitrary strings that represent a given site and are computed by NoSquint based on the current page's URL and the user-defined list of exceptions. For instance, both foo.example.com and myapp.*.example.com could be site names, depending on the exceptions defined. NoSquint looks up zoom levels based on the site name. The site name, as determined by NoSquint, is by default displayed in the status bar beside the current zoom level.

When a wildcard is enclosed in square brackets (i.e. [*] or [**]), the literal wildcard (* or **) will be used in the site name instead of the characters the wildcard matches. This is allows you to group together locations. For example, if the page's URL is google.ca and you've defined an exception google.[*], the site name will be google.*. Since google.fi matches this pattern, the site name would also be google.*. Therefore, google.ca and google.fi would be considered the same site.

Hostnames and paths are evaluated separately; an exception pattern is split into two sub-patterns, one for the host, and one for the path. These sub-patterns match substrings, but hosts are right-anchored, while paths are left-anchored. This means that any wildcards specified in the host name will not match any characters in the path, and vice versa. When the hostname part of a pattern is only *, it matches the domain of the page's URL. For example, for www.google.com, a single * matches google.com; for www.bbc.co.uk it matches bbc.co.uk.

When multiple exceptions match a page's URL, NoSquint will use the exception that matches the most non-wildcard characters in the host name. If there are still multiple exceptions in that narrowed list, the exception that matches the most non-wildcard characters in the path is then chosen. If still there are multiple exceptions, the first one that matched is chosen.