The managers let you control the state of subsystems, such as cookies and the global history. They are accessible from the Tools or Setup submenu in the Main Menu. The managers consists of an area showing a hierarchic listbox and buttons at the bottom. Below, a view of the cookie manager is shown.

+------------------------- Cookie manager -------------------------+
|                                                                  |
|   [-]- bugzilla.elinks.cz                                        |
|    |    |-- BUGLIST                                              |
|    |    `-- LASTORDER                                            |
|   [+]- kerneltrap.org                                            |
|   [+]-*dictionary.reference.com                                  |
|   [+]-*bjork.com                                                 |
|   [-]- www.google.com                                            |
|         `-- PREF                                                 |
|                                                                  |
|                                                                  |
|                                                                  |
|                                                                  |
|   [ Info ]  [ Add ]  [ Edit ]  [ Delete ]  [ Save ]  [ Close ]   |
+------------------------------------------------------------------+

Each item is either a folder or a leaf. A folder is displayed with a [-] or [+] before the name telling whether the folder is currently open or closed. Nested items are displayed indented compared to the folder they are nested in. In the cookie manager example above "bjork.com" is a folder and "PREF" is a leaf.

Items can be "marked", which makes it possible to select a group of items and perform an action on them, such as deleting all marked items. If any item has been marked the currently selected item is ignored when performing the action. Marked items are displayed with an asterisk (*) prefixing the name.

The buttons make it possible to perform actions either on selected or marked items or on all items in the manager. Buttons named Clear and Save are performed on all items; Clear will delete all items and Save will update the runtime state file associated with the manager in the ~/.elinks/ directory. Most buttons presses will query you before completing the action.

At any time, both the currently selected item and button are highlighted. The same goes for marked items. Most manager dialogs also maintains the state, so that when you reopen the manager later it will have the same items selected and the same folders opened or closed.

The basic default controls for managers are the following:

Some managers also supports searching, either by pressing the Search button or by pressing /. By searching the empty string, all hidden items from the previous search will be shown again.