3/1015.1 Browsing collections, clusters and documents
Figure 15.2: The Harmony Session Manager
The Harmony Session Manager embodies most of Harmony' s navigational facilities. From top to bottom, the Session Manager is composed of four distinct regions, as is illustrated in Figure 15.2: menu bar, tool bar, collection browser and a two-line status area. The collection browser is the main window of the Harmony Session Manager: it provides intuitive hierarchical navigation through Hyper-G collection structures. Icons are used to indicate collections, clusters, documents and anchors. Table 15.1 shows icons typically used to represent Hyper-G objects in the Session Manager. A red tick overlaid in the bottom right corner of a document or cluster icon indicates that this object has been visited already during the current session. Ticks may appear in conjunction with any cluster or document icon, not only text documents. A green arrow overlaid in the bottom left of a document icon indicates an anchor object (either source or destination) in a document of the specified type. Anchor objects are not currently represented in the collection browser; they can, however, be assigned searchable attributes and thus appear in the search result list.
| Icon | Meaning | Icon | Meaning |
 | Collection (closed) | 
| Image document |
 | Collection (open) |  | Film document |
 | Cluster |  | Audio document |
 | Cluster (visited) |  | PostScript document |
 | Text document |  | Scene document |
 | Text document (visited) |  | Generic document |
 | Anchor in text document |  | Telnet session |
 | Anchor in text (visited) |
Hierarchical navigation through Hyper-G collection structures is extremely intuitive, since users are presented with a limited set of visible choices at each level. One popular way of finding information on a Hyper-G server is to start at the top collection and open up sub-collections until the desired information is found.
Collections may be opened and closed and documents retrieved in a number of alternative ways: by double-left-clicking, by selecting and using menu commands and via extensive keyboard shortcuts. The currently selected object (collection, cluster or document) is framed in a thin box. Objects may be selected by single-left-clicking with the mouse, or by using the arrow keys to move the current selection focus. The currently selected object is the target of a number of commands and operations. To provide visual feedback, the most recently displayed document or cluster is underlaid with a solid bar (it is not necessarily the same object as the current selection).
 15.1.1 Navigational functions |
| 15.1.2 Informational functions |
| 15.1.3 The toolbar |
| 15.1.4 Keyboard support |