GipPasso

Ratpoison: the window non-manager.

I call Ratpoison a window non-manager because windows disappear from the central role they play in common window managers and desktop environments. The lesson is taken by GNU Screen. The screen can be divided in non overlapping frames, and all is done with the keyboard, avoiding the user all waste of attention on her/his work. For me, with emacs, the above cited GNU Screen and xterm, ratpoison is now in my tool set for daily work.

ratpoisonrc

to be put or linked in a hidden file in user's home directory (e.g. /home/user/.ratpoisonrc).
The main thing I find handy is to have a one-clic escape sequence, and one I don't use in any other situation, or that I use or used for analogous pourpose. F12 answers to all these demands because it isn't used in any software I use (instead the default C-t conflicts with the shortcut used for switch two characters in a terminal emulator or others emacs' shortcuts), and I've used it for years to call yakuake when I mainly used KDE.

Even it's not so present in the normal use of ratpoison, the root window, not only the so called wallpaper but also some usefull piece of information, is set by a script, described in the root window page. The other applications run in my configuration are synclient, an executable installed in Debian with the packet xserver-xorg-input-synaptics used to set up touchpad's advanced functionalities, and emacs (whose server is launched with emacs --daemon).
Finally I run a couple of sessions of xrootconsole for a continous monitoring of the two most important log file of all system for a dekstop pc or a personal workstation, /var/log/mail.log and /var/log/messages. The second one has no need of presentation; it's the best way of knowing what's going on at kernel level. The other one plays a key role for me because I often modify my mail server configuration and it rarely comes back running at first attempt.

A part from the escape sequence, I've specified a couple of shortcuts.

s-d: that executes the ratpoison's showroot command, that shows the root window (and so the wallpaper, and all applications that send ther their output),
s-e: that runs emacsclient -c -a emacs and so it opens an emacs client window if the server is still running or, alternatively (-a) launches a new emacs session.
s-s: that executes the command xscreensaver-command -activate (the xscreensaver daemon is run at the end of my ratpoisonrc
s-FN: (of course N=1...12) runs applications more frequently used; for example F1 and F2 run web browsers, while F12, F11 run applications like fbpanel, kmix and Samsung laser printer manager (Samsung ships with its laser printers an excellent graphical user interface for administrating printers for linux).

As other pages in this site...well, as each page in this site, this one is useful mostly for myself, for an easier organization of my work when I configure Ratpoison, and not for giving comprehensive informations on how to set it up.