boartty/doc/source/usage.rst

3.2 KiB

Usage

After installing Gertty, you should be able to run it by invoking gertty. If you installed it in a virtualenv, you can invoke it without activating the virtualenv with /path/to/venv/bin/gertty which you may wish to add to your shell aliases. Use gertty --help to see a list of command line options available.

Once Gertty is running, you will need to start by subscribing to some projects. Use 'L' to list all of the projects and then 's' to subscribe to the ones you are interested in. Hit 'L' again to shrink the list to your subscribed projects.

In general, pressing the F1 key will show help text on any screen, and ESC will take you to the previous screen.

Gertty works seamlessly offline or online. All of the actions that it performs are first recorded in a local database (in ~/.gertty.db by default), and are then transmitted to Gerrit. If Gertty is unable to contact Gerrit for any reason, it will continue to operate against the local database, and once it re-establishes contact, it will process any pending changes.

The status bar at the top of the screen displays the current number of outstanding tasks that Gertty must perform in order to be fully up to date. Some of these tasks are more complicated than others, and some of them will end up creating new tasks (for instance, one task may be to search for new changes in a project which will then produce 5 new tasks if there are 5 new changes).

If Gertty is offline, it will so indicate in the status bar. It will retry requests if needed, and will switch between offline and online mode automatically.

If you review a change while offline with a positive vote, and someone else leaves a negative vote on that change in the same category before Gertty is able to upload your review, Gertty will detect the situation and mark the change as "held" so that you may re-inspect the change and any new comments before uploading the review. The status bar will alert you to any held changes and direct you to a list of them (the F12 key by default). When viewing a change, the "held" flag may be toggled with the exclamation key (!). Once held, a change must be explicitly un-held in this manner for your review to be uploaded.

If Gertty encounters an error, this will also be indicated in the status bar. You may wish to examine ~/.gertty.log to see what the error was. In many cases, Gertty can continue after encountering an error. The error flag will be cleared when you leave the current screen.

To select text (e.g., to copy to the clipboard), hold Shift while selecting the text.

Terminal Integration

If you use rxvt-unicode, you can add something like the following to .Xresources to make Gerrit URLs that are displayed in your terminal (perhaps in an email or irc client) clickable links that open in Gertty:

URxvt.perl-ext:           default,matcher
URxvt.url-launcher:       sensible-browser
URxvt.keysym.C-Delete:    perl:matcher:last
URxvt.keysym.M-Delete:    perl:matcher:list
URxvt.matcher.button:     1
URxvt.matcher.pattern.1:  https:\/\/review.example.org/(\\#\/c\/)?(\\d+)[\w]*
URxvt.matcher.launcher.1: gertty --open $0

You will want to adjust the pattern to match the review site you are interested in; multiple patterns may be added as needed.