The button "State" at the top of the window opens a menu with an entry "gv options". Selectiong this entry opens another window with various options to set when gv starts up. While I can select options and apply them (I'm interested in "Watch file"), saving them has no effect. I find the options I've set in the file .gv in my home directory (with a date indicating the file has just been modified), but when I start gv it seems to ignore this file. This used to work before, probably in version 3.6.1-r3.
See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=393454 for a working patch
thank you, fixed in portage