gtkcookie supports the command flags common to all Gtk applications. There are no gtkcookie-specific flags.

On startup, gtkcookie will try to find your Netscape cookie file by looking for ~/.netscape/cookies. If ~/.netscape/cookies is found, gtkcookie will load the file and show it in a multi-column list.

Regardless of whether gtkcookie finds your cookie file, or you have to open it manually, when you open the file, all of your Netscape cookies are displayed in whatever order Netscape wrote them into the file.

You can sort the cookies by any column by clicking on the heading for that column.

The final column is actually not stored in your cookie file, but is a translation of Netscape's native date field. Netscape stores the date as the number of seconds since 1 Jan 1970 (familiar to anyone who's spent any time on Unix), but gtkcookie translates those dates into human-readable expiry dates in the final column.

To edit a cookie, double-click on the cookie, and a cookie edit dialogue will pop up. You'll notice that the date, in seconds since the epoch (the epoch is 1 Jan 1970), is not an editable field, whereas the human-readable date is. Follow the format presented in the edit dialogue box, and as you edit the human-readable date, the expiry date in seconds since the epoch will update itself. Please note (as repeated in the bugs section below) that although dates later than 2038 are supposed to present problems, (you'll see the date in seconds since the epoch become -1) dates on or after 2036 seem to present problems. I'm still looking into this.

Under the Edit menu, select Find. Type in a string or substring that you wish to find, and press the Find button. If the string or substring is found anywhere in a cookie, that cookie will become selected, and the view will scroll to that cookie, if necessary. Pressing Find again will search for the next instance, or pop up a "not found" dialogue box if the string wasn't found. In its current version, gtkcookie isn't yet smart enough to re-start a search from the top of the cookie list, so if you need to search from the top, hightlight the first cookie, and then do your search.

Right click on a cookie, and select "Delete" from the popup menu, or click on the cookie and press "Del" on your keyboard.

Press the "Create Cookie" button. A cookie with dummy values will be added to the cookie list, and the "Edit Cookie" dialogue box will pop up so that you can edit the new cookie to your liking. Note that even if you press "Cancel" immediately after creating a new cookie, the new cookie, with its dummy values, will still be in the list. You'll have to delete the cookie manually.