How-To Guides

Practical guides for getting things done with gnaw.

• Install gnaw — A complete installation guide for gnaw on different operating systems.
• Interactive selection in the TUI — Use the gnaw TUI to browse a repo, filter with substring and glob search, trim to a token budget, pick a template, and copy the result.
• Shrink a prompt with compression — Use gnaw's syntax-aware compression to cut token count by stripping bodies, tests, and doc comments while keeping signatures.
• Pipe a file list into gnaw — Feed gnaw a newline-delimited list of paths on stdin — from git, fd, or ripgrep — to build a prompt from exactly those files, no walk and no globbing.
• Use gnaw as an MCP server — Run gnaw's MCP server so Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP client can call codebase extraction as a tool during a session.
• Split a big repo across files — Use --split-size to slice an oversized prompt into multiple token-budgeted parts you can paste one at a time.
• Scan for leaked secrets — Use --secret-scan to catch API keys, tokens, and private keys before they end up pasted into a chat.
• Enable shell completion — Turn on tab-completion for gnaw's flags, enum values, template names, and paths in bash, zsh, or fish.