giFTcurs - cursed frontend to giFT

giFTcurs [options]

giFTcurs is a curses frontend to the giFT daemon. giFT is a hub used to connect to many distributed filesharing networks. Right now there are three plugins, OpenFT, Gnutella, and FastTrack. New plugins are on the way.

This program follows the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes (`--'). A summary of options is included below.

-a, --stickchars

Use 7-bit chars for line drawing.

-h, --help

Show summary of options.

-V, --version

Show version of program.

-v, --verbose

Print lots of debugging information to standard error.

-s, --server=host:port

Connect to another host than the default, localhost:1213.

-p, --profile=name

Connect with another profile than your username. This currently has no effect on giFT.

-d, --nomouse

Do not read mouse clicks.

When you start giFTcurs you'll see the main screen. The statistics in the upper right corner are the accumulated statistics reported by giFT.

To start a search, type a query into the query field. giFT takes each word in your query and matches it against tokenized filenames. So a search for giFTcurs.*tar.gz is parsed as giFTcurs tar gz. To exclude a word from a search, prepend the word with -. This means that a search for giFTcurs -tar, would match filenames which contain the word giFTcurs but not the word tar. To start a search press the Enter key or use tab to move to the Start search button. You will now hopefully see some files in the Search Results box, use tab to get there. You may later use tab to get back.

The first number in the search results list shows how many users with that file currently have available upload slots. This is followed by filesize and filename. Depending on the type of the file, other meta data may be shown. E.g., if it is an audio file, you should see bitrate and duration.

Use up/down, page up/down and home/end to navigate in the list. To change the sorting order press left or right. Press Enter or D when you've highlighted a file you want to download.

To monitor transfers press F3, or click on the Transfers button. Use tab to change between the two lists. The green stuff that appears on transfers is the progress bar, not a bug.

If you're not happy with how giFTcurs looks, press F5. You will see three lists and some buttons. The first list contains a list of color items that can be changed by going to the other two lists. You can use left and right, as well as tab, to change the active field. Press Save theme when you're done. The Show shares or Hide shares button is used to make giFT show your shares, or hide your shares so that new uploads can't be started. Please only hide your shares if you need bandwidth and please show them again when you're done. The Sync shares button instructs giFT to reread its configuration and search the share root for changes.

~/.giFT/ui/ui.conf

This file is written by giFT-setup and specifies the default host and port giFT clients will connect to. These values can be overridden by the -s command line option. This is what the file would look like with the default configuration:

[daemon]
host = 127.0.0.1
port = 1213

~/.giFT/ui/giFTcurs.conf

This file contains, among other things, the color theme for giFTcurs. See giFTcurs.conf(5) for more information.

If your terminal leaves garbage at some places when running giFTcurs, your TERM environment variable isn't correctly set. This could also be the case when some keys aren't working. To fix this set the TERM environment variable to match your terminal. Look in /usr/share/terminfo for an entry that your terminal likes. Some examples are Eterm-color, gnome, mach, xterm, xterm-xf86-v40 and linux.

If the Fx-keys just won't work, try M-x or ESC x instead, or simply click in the button bar.

If giFTcurs is compiled with mouse support, you can control most of it using the mouse. If your terminal supports it, you can even use the scroll wheel. If you're using the mouse support and you want to cut and paste, hold shift while doing it.

DISPLAY

When set, giFTcurs will change the X title and icon of the current window. If your terminal emulator doesn't support it, you will hear a beep instead.

HOME

is used to find where the configuration file is.

LOGNAME

This will be the default value to use as profile when the connection to the daemon is made.

PAGER

This program will be used to show eventual messages from the daemon when program exits.

TERM

The curses library depends on this being set to reflect your terminal type.

USER

If LOGNAME is not set, USER will be used instead.

The distributed file TODO has notes on what remains to be implemented.

If you want to report a problem with giFTcurs, please report it to our bug tracker at Savannah: <http://savannah.nongnu.org/p/giftcurs>.

Provide a detailed description of the bug, the version of the program you were running (giFTcurs -V displays this information), the operating system your are running the program on and if the program crashes, we would appreciate a stack trace. We would also like to see the debugging output from the program, which can be seen by passing the `-v' flag and redirecting stderr.

G[:o]ran Weinholt <weinholt@dtek.chalmers.se>, Christian H[:a]ggstr[:o]m <chm@c00.info>.

Many thanks to the people in #giFT for suggestions and bug reports. Thanks also to the giFT developers for making giFT. Indeed do many things come to pass.

giFT(1), giFTcurs.conf(5).