Frequently asked questions about ginsu

Where is the ginsu homepage?

How do I report a bug in ginsu?

http://bugs.ofb.net/cgi-bin/bugzilla/enter_bug.cgi?product=Ginsu

When starting it locks up on trying to connect to the server.

It is likely that for some reason DNS is taking to long to load or locking up. Add a GALE_PROXY line to ginsu.config with the name of a known working gale server such as gale.ofb.net.

The static binaries don't seem to work.

Due to libc weirdness, static binaries may not look up hostnames properly. A workaround is to set GALE_PROXY to the IP address of a known server with a line such as

 GALE_PROXY 205.217.153.34   # gale.ofb.net

I get an error about it running out of files.

GHC had a bug in the socket library where is leaked file descriptors in certain situations. Compiling ginsu with GHC 6.2 or better should fix this.

How can I compose my puff in a split window like vtfugu?

Well, you can't really. If you run ginsu under screen you can make the editor appear in a split region, but even so the main ginsu window won't update until you finish composing. Set EDITOR in ginsu.conf to splitvim.sh, and then put the following scripts in your path.

splitvim.sh:

 #!/bin/sh
 screen -X eval split focus "resize 15"
 fifo=/tmp/splitvim-fifo-$$
 mkfifo $fifo
 screen visplit.sh $fifo "$@"
 cat $fifo > /dev/null
 rm $fifo
 screen -X remove

visplit.sh:

 #!/bin/sh
 fifo=$1
 shift
 vim "$@"
 echo done > $fifo

These should be easily adaptable to whatever editor you prefer. Change the number in the "resize 15" line to adjust how many lines the editor splits away from the main window.

Another option is to use a graphical editor such as gvim that spawns its own window.

How do I get a key if I don't have an account somewhere with gale set up?

The easiest way is to use the ginsu-mdk program which comes with newer versions of ginsu, if that does not work you may get a yammer key by going to http://yammer.net/ and signing up for an account. you may then download your key pair and use them with ginsu.

How do I keep xterm from clearing the screen when I spawn an external editor?

put

xterm*titeInhibit: true

in your .Xdefaults file.

How do I keep ginsu from using so much memory?

First of all, upgrade to 0.6.5 if you have not already. It uses much much much less memory than previous versions.

Beyond that there are various options you can pass to the runtime system linked with ginsu. to see of list of them run

ginsu +RTS -h

in particular

ginsu +RTS -M20M will set the maximum usage to 20 megabytes.

however be warned, this could cause ginsu to bail if it actually needs that much and will cause it to use more CPU by garbage collecting more often. There are many other options to play with in there also, feel free to experiment.

GinsuFaq