Leech's interface is designed to provide the information you need to manage your downloads, and yet do so without getting in your way.
Main Window
This is Leech's main window, where you'll see all your download activity. Read Ways to Download for information on getting downloads into this window.
You can double-click any listed download to instantly reveal it in the Finder.
The Toolbar
Leech's standard toolbar includes five icons (and a search box, not shown below):
From left to right, these icons do the following: begin all downloads, pause any queued downloads (downloads beyond your max simultaneous allowed value in Settings), toggle acceleration on/off, toggle bandwidth limiting on/off (see the Settings section for more about these two commands), and the More Actions button (see below).
The acceleration and bandwidth throttling icons will highlight when active, as seen with the bandwidth throttling icon in the above screenshot.
If you right-click (or Control-click) on the toolbar, you can customize the toolbar, removing the stock icons, and/or adding two (technically three) new icons:
The first pair of buttons serve as shortcuts to the Schedule section of Leech's settings; click the leftmost one to activate the "Start pending downloads" feature, and the rightmost one to activate the "Pause waiting downloads automatically" feature..
The other button does what it says—adds whatever's on the pasteboard to the queue.
If you've customized the toolbar and would like to get back to the default setup, just drag the "default set" from the bottom of the customization window into the toolbar area.
Listed Downloads
There are two main ways you can work with listed downloads (active or queued) in Leech's window: the contextual menu and the More Actions icon in the toolbar.
Contextual Menu
Right-click (or Control-click) on one or more (using Shift- or Command-click to select more than one download) and you'll see a contextual menu you can use on the selected files.
Most of these items are self-explanatory, so there's no need to explain them in detail. These features, though, do need a bit of explaining:
- Pause While Pause (and its counterpart, Resume) seems obvious, please remember that the ability to resume a paused download depends on the configuration of the server you're downloading from; some servers just don't do resumes.
- Sort by This setting controls only the visual order of the queue; it won't change the actual download order of the queued files.
- Download to This menu replicates the options you see in the "Download To" section of Leech's File menu. You can pick a new download location, or define a rule that controls where downloaded files get saved.
- Shut Down When Done… If selected, Leech will shut down your computer when the last download is done. Don't worry if you accidentally select this item—there's a confirmation dialog to make sure it's what you want to do.
- Rearrange Queue By Rearranges the actual download order (unlike Sort by, which merely rearranges the list) based on the criteria you choose (Date Added, Host, Name, or Progress). See the Queue section of the Menus help page for more on the rearrange feature.
More Actions button in Toolbar
The More Actions button is nearly identical in operation as the contextual menu, except it doesn't allow for changing per-download settings. As such, you won't see Pause, Remove, Reveal, Open URL, or Copy URL in this menu. Everything else, though, is there.
The Dock Icon
Leech's Dock icon provides at-a-glance details on your current download queue.
In this example, there are two active downloads (the "2" badge), one paused download (the "1" badge), and the arrow is changing from dark green to white to indicate download progress. The arrow fills with white (from bottom to top) as downloads complete; when it's solid white, all downloads are done.