Select Leech > Settings, or press Command-Comma, to open Leech's Settings window. Each section (tab) in Leech's settings will be covered below; you can skip to any section using the navigation menu at top right of this window.
General
By default, Leech downloads to your user's Downloads folder. You can, however, specify any other folder you like by changing this pop-up.
You can choose an individual folder for a given download by holding the shift key while dropping a URL on Leech's Downloads window.
Most browsers instantly start downloading every URL you add to their download queues at once. This behavior can be frustrating if you trigger lots of downloads at the same time, because it takes forever for the first download to complete.
These two pop-ups control the number of downloads that are started at the same time (overall, and from one site), so your bandwidth isn't shared by too many downloads. You can set each pop-up to anywhere from 1 to at most 9, or as shown, to all.
While downloading files, Leech uses temporary files. The default, where the resulting files will be located, places these files in the same folder where the finished download will be saved. Change this setting to out of sight, and you won't see the temporary files. (This is most useful if you use Mac OS X's folder actions to further process downloaded files.)
When set to out of sight, you can't double-click an in-progress download to have it shown in the Finder. This is a feature, not a bug!
Check either or both boxes to force Leech to quit when you close the main window (i.e. how System Settings behaves), or when all downloads have finished. If you're using browser integration, Leech will launch automatically when required.
The Alert to pop-up dialog controls what happens if Leech tries to quit while downloads are active. By default, you'll get an alert dialog; change this pop-up to Pause, and Leech will pause any pending downloads.
Note that not all downloads are resumable, so if you use the Pause option, you may have to start over again when you relaunch Leech.
Speed
Leech has the seemingly-magical ability to (possibly) accelerate some downloads, beyond the rate you'd normally see. How does this magic work? If a server limits each connection to (for example) 200KB per second, that's the most you'll see on a "normal" connection. But if you enable acceleration, Leech will open multiple concurrent connections, each of which should get that same 200KB per second. Open four connections, and now you get 800KB per second total speed. (Behind the scenes, Leech works to put the four parts together into one file.)
As noted, some site operators dislike multiple concurrent connections; if you abuse this setting, you may find that some servers will block your connections—so please, use this feature responsibly.
Acceleration will not work on all servers, and obviously, you can't use more speed than you have available—we can't increase the speed of your connection to the internet!
Leech also allows you to slow your download speed—perhaps you're streaming a movie and want to make sure that you've got enough bandwidth for that task, but want to keep your Leech downloads going. To limit bandwidth, check the box and enter a limit in kilobytes per second. When you want full speed back, remove the checkmark.
Schedule
The Schedule section allows you to control when Leech downloads files; this can be very useful if your connection is metered—or more costly—during the day, but unlimited at night.
When first opened, the Schedule tab of Leech's settings is pretty boring, as seen above. Check the boxes to enable the scheduling features, though, and the following scheduling options will appear.
This box lets you specify the time at which all downloads in the queue will begin downloading. Once enabled, any paused downloads will begin downloading at the chosen time.
This box lets you specify the time at which all downloads in the queue will stop downloading. Once enabled, no queued downloads will begin downloading after the chosen time. If you check the "Also pause active downloads" box, then even currently-active downloads will stop after the chosen time.
Behaviors
What will Leech do when URLs are dragged onto its Dock icon. Bring Leech to front will bring it to the foreground and leave it there; Move Leech to back will keep Leech active just long enough to add the dropped URL to the task list, then return to the background; Hide Leech will hide Leech after adding the dropped URL.
Use these two pop-ups to control how Leech gets your attention. You can receive feedback When a download is done, When all downloads are done, or Never. Note that Leech will only bounce its Dock icon if it's in the background.
By checking either or both of these boxes, Leech will automatically remove completed downloads and/or failed downloads from its main window.
When checked, Leech's main window will automatically scale to fit all the downloads in the list. Left unchecked, you control the size of Leech's window.
History
The History section of Leech's Settings let you specify how many downloads to keep track of—from 10 to 500—or all. You can also choose no to not track any downloads. The two checkboxes control if Leech remembers everything, or just completed downloads, and whether or not to clear history when you quit Leech.
Advanced
Sounds scary, doesn't it? Relax, it's not that bad. Here you'll find a collection of settings that give you more control over Leech's operation and output.
The user agent is a string of text that's sent by browsers when you visit a web site; some sites change what you see based on the value in your user agent string. By default, Leech identifies itself as Leech with its user agent string. For example, here's how version Leech 3.2 (build 3166 as of this writing) identifies itself to the sites you download from:
This should work fine for the vast majority of sites. However, if you have trouble downloading from a given site, it's possible that site is expecting a "true" browser user agent string. In those cases, you can change the user agent value to make Leech appear to be (for example) a given version of Safari:
The user agent string will vary by browser and version of browser; the easiest way to find it for any given browser is to run a web search for 'my user agent' and click on any of the resulting matches.
To return to Leech's default user agent, just delete the text in the user agent box.
Use this pop-up to control how Leech sets a filename's extension. It will use the file type to set the extension if there currently is none, or if the current extension is incorrect, or if the current extension is not the preferred one. Alternatively, you can set this to never, and Leech will never change the extension based on file type.
These seemingly-innocuous options actually hide a lot of power—they allow Leech to automatically sort downloads (both standard and rule-based) into a series of date-based folders. The boxes control the format of the date field for both normal and rules-based downloads.
Click the downward arrow at the right of either box to see a pop-up list of selectable date formats:
You can pick any of these pre-made formats…or type your own into the input box.
Formatting that includes a forward slash will create subfolders, as shown in the second example above. You can include a slash anywhere you'd like Leech to create a new subfolder for your downloads.
As for what kind of information you can use in the field, there are a huge number of choices. Here are some more-common options you may want to use:
| Symbol | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| yy | Year as two digits | 2015 => 15 |
| yyyy | Year as four digits | 2015 => 2015 |
| M | Month number as one digit (if possible) | March => 3 October => 10 |
| MM | Month number as two digits | March => 03 October => 10 |
| MMM | Month abbreviation | March => Mar September => Sept |
| MMMM | Month as full name | August => August |
| d | Day of the month | June 3rd => 3 |
| D | Day of the year | June 3rd 2015 => 154 |
The above table just scratches the surface of the formats you can define; Leech implements these Unicode date formatting options. You should be able to use anything you see in that table—though you may not want to, as a downloads folder with a new subfolder for every second you downloaded a file might become unwieldy, for example.
When you choose to subdivide your downloads by providing a format, you'll see one new pop-up with an option to set:
This pop-up controls which date the subdivision function uses: Date downloaded (the date you downloaded the file) or Date added (the date you added the file to Leech's download queue). Whichever date you choose is the one that will be used as the basis for the subdivisions.
This box lets you specify a regular expression to control what Leech's Safari extension downloads you use it to download all linked items on a page. You'll see that option when you activate the contextual menu on any blank area of a web page; it'll look something like this:
You probably don't want all 62 things downloaded, though. You may only be interested in the images on the page, for example. This is what the URL gathering filter will help with. For example, this string will filter the links, downloading only those whose extension is jpeg, jpg, or png:
\.(jpe?g|png)$The structure looks odd if you don't know regular expressions, but the good news is you'll most likely only really care about filename extensions, so you can just variations of the above as needed. Want to download all the .dmg or .zip files on a page? Use this string…
\.(dmg|zip)$The structure is even simpler if you just want to download links with one extension, like all mp4 files:
\.mp4$If you do know regular expressions, you can do some powerful stuff with this filter, but even in its simplest form, it can help narrow what Leech sees to download.
Leech can be run as a standard application—its icon will appear in your Dock, and its menus on your menu bar.
It can also be run in menu bar mode, which will remove the Dock icon and full set of menus, and replace them with a simple menu bar icon with drop down menu:
Click Downloads to open the standard Leech Downloads window (it will remain open even when you switch to another app), and use the other menu bar items to reach other areas of Leech's interface. Remember that the Downloads window contains a toolbar where you can start and stop downloads, set acceleration and/or bandwidth limits, and more.
The Leech menu bar icon is also a drag target: Drag any download URL over the icon, and you'll see the standard OS X green "plus sign" cursor, like you get when Option-dragging a file in Finder. Drop the download URL on the Leech icon, and that download will be added to your list of downloads.
Finally, you can run Leech in hybrid mode, which is basically a combination of standard and menu bar modes: You get a Leech icon in your Dock with full menus when you switch to it…but you also get the menu bar icon, so you can use it as a drag target or quick way to reach Leech's main window.
If you'd like Leech to launch at login, check the Launch automatically box.