From the terminal

While the browser is running, riptide hands its arguments to that instance (per profile, so --basedir instances stay separate) and exits:

riptide https://example.com        # opens per new_instance_open_target (default: new tab)
riptide --target tab-bg notes.html # relative files become file:// URLs
riptide ':tab-focus 1' ':reload'   # arguments starting with ':' run as commands

With several windows open, URLs go to the one you used last; new_instance_open_target_window can pick the first-opened or last-opened window instead.

The browser listens on a Unix socket in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/riptide/ (or the data directory), inside a 0700 directory and with 0600 permissions, so only your user can send commands. On Windows each start is a new instance for now.

Internal pages

The tab bar, status bar and overlay are HTML pages served from the browser itself at riptide://ui/…. Web pages can't link to, frame or redirect to riptide:// addresses, and only riptide://ui/ pages get the rt.send() channel to Rust. The browser accepts only the messages each page is allowed to send.

Pages you can open: riptide://help/ (:help), riptide://history/ (:history), riptide://downloads/ (:downloads), riptide://settings/ (:settings) and riptide://changelog/ (:changelog). The first start after an update opens the changelog in a background tab when the version's minor or major number changed; changelog_after_upgrade (major, minor, patch or never) sets how big a step that takes.