I have tried many torrent clients on Linux, but none as good as rtorrent. Why rTorrent? Because its light-weight. Very Very Light-weight. Some applications tend to be real memory hoggers. Azureus was one of them (when i had last used it that is). The other option i had in Linux was KTorrent. However KTorrent requires that you have the KDE window manager installed... if not the window manager, then atleast the libraries that are required for KDE. But after having moved away from KDE to XFCE window manager, ktorrent was also ruled out.

That is where rTorrent came to my rescue (For that matter almost all CLI based applications have helped me in the same way in the past).

rTorrent requires a small learning curve if you are not very fond of CLI applications, but believe me, its worth the miniscule effort. In this article i would get you through the basic tips on getting started with RTorrent, while assuming that you have already installed it. For the rest it, you could refer to the official manual.

The 3 minute guide

First up, before firing the command, you need to have the rtorrent configuration file ".rtorrent.rc" in place. If your distribution does not provide you with a sample .rtorrent.rc file, you could download one from the official site. This file could be placed in /home/sxt/.rtorrent.rc Though you can configure a lot of parameters in this file, the bare minimum you'll need would be "directory" and "session". You could have these parameters as

directory = /home/sxt/torrents
session = /home/sxt/.rtorrent

Now, you could fire rTorrent by simply running the command "rtorrent" in your terminal window. Or, if you want to start by queueing a torrent for download, you would start with something like

rtorrent mothers_pride.torrent

Next time onwards, you could fire rtorrent without any arguments, and still see your past torrents.

Now, you might want to do some tasks on the torrents on the current window. For that you'll need commands. Commands are going to be either a single character on the keyboard, or a combination CTRL-character. (e.g. ^D, ^S etc.) Some vital commands you might want to use more frequently are:

 Selective download of files using rtorrent

You could download files in a torrent selectively in the following manner:
Navigate into the file list in the torrent after having opened it in rTorrent. when the file in question is highlighted, use the "spacebar" to change the prority of download. the Asterix key ("*") can be used to change the prority of all file

Thats all in this 3-minute guide. I hope this will help you get started to the least. You must refer the manual for more details.