Choose one of these options by typing the highlighted letter of your selection, with or without the ALT key being pressed, or by using the arrow keys to move the highlight bar to the selection and pressing ENTER. Alternatively, if a mouse is present, you can click on the desired selection with the mouse. Pressing `F1' will pop up a brief description of the active keys.
The entries are displayed on the screen in the following manner: The name of the entry appears as a centered title of the display window. In the bottom left corner appears the bibliography file name, while in the bottom right corner appears the entry type. An asterisk appears next to the bibliography file name if the file is ReadOnly, while a plus sign precedes the file name whenever the program is in link mode. In the top right corner appear the sequential absolute and pattern–conforming numbers of the entry, respectively (only the absolute number appears if no pattern is in force). The rest of the entry is shown on screen in a manner which is defined in the configuration file (see below). This format is extremely flexible and can be changed to suit individual tastes and user defined bibliography styles. An additional point – BibTEX macros and fields containing macros are preceded by the `@' character. This character will not appear in the database file.
If the entry is too long to fit on the screen, it can be scrolled using the `PgUp', `PgDn', `Home' and `End' keys. One can also scroll the screen using the mouse, in the following fashion. Clicking on one of the arrows in the corners of the window scrolls the window up or down. Clicking the mouse on an empty spot on the top and bottom margins of the window scrolls the screen to the top and bottom of the entry, respectively. Note that the scrolling can be relatively slow. However, it should be needed fairly rarely.
There is an additional way to enter the `Edit' mode. Clicking the mouse on a blank place on the screen is equivalent to choosing `Edit Entry' in the ``Edit'' menu on the main screen. Clicking on a displayed field will put you in `Edit' mode, and let you edit that specific field. This is equivalent to choosing `Edit' from the top menu, and choosing that field for editing. Note that editing is switched off in link mode.
BibDB also supports simple page layout formatting. Including a user specified control inserts one or more line breaks into the displayed fields. In addition, tilde characters ``~" are displayed as spaces, allowing the insertion of simple tables into displayed BibTEX fields. These options are controlled by the configuration file.
Beginning in version 1.4, the display format can be toggled between the configuration file specified format (default), and a ``see all" format in which all non-zero fields are displayed, one to a line. Toggling the display format is performed by pressing ``Alt-V" (sorry, no mouse equivalent in this menu).