Back to the Ratpoison window manager
====================================
Inspired by Tomas I went back to the Ratpoison window
manager on my Thinkpads (X201 running OpenBSD and X270
running FreeBSD).
The last few years I have been using DWM, and before that
briefly i3. And before that, I have been using Ratpoison
for probably more than a decade.
Suckless DWM
------------
I only use applications in full screen and never used the
functions of DWM to have more than one window opened under a
tag.
DWM offers the option to have floating windows. I have only
used that for Gimp and for the Tiger VNC viewer.
For me, the most important feature of DWM is the option to
open a certain application always under a specific tag.
Like Emacs always under tag 1, the Firefox web browser
always under tag 6, and so on.
This is configured in the config.h file, followed by a
recompile of DWM.
It is not that hard to mimic this in Ratpoison. In Ratpoison
you use window numbers.
Jumping to a window by number in Ratpoison
------------------------------------------
In Ratpoison, you jump to a specific window with:
C-t <n>
where <n> is the number you want to jump to.
Moving a window to a specific number
------------------------------------
To move a window to a specific number, just use:
C-t : number <n>
Ratmen
------
I also use ratmen with a small script to dynamicly create a
menu for easy switching between windows.
This works great, but jumping to the window number is more
efficient.
Status bar
----------
In DWM I used slstatus to show the battery status and the
date and time. Also I used it to keep an eye on the CPU
temperature.
Regarding the battery status, I am mostly interested in the
remaining time, so I have slstatus configures to show only
that.
After I installed Solene's obsdfreqd, the CPU temperature
never had been an issue, so I stopt keep an eye on it.
The battery status is still important, of course.
In Ratpoison I don't have a status bar.
The battery status is shown in the tmux bar as well as in
the Emacs mode line.
The date and time are also shown in the tmux bar and in the
Emacs mode line.
So, although it is not always in sight, I see the battery
status and the date and time often enough.
To get the battery status in the tmux bar I created a small
shell script. This made it easy to let Ratpoison show the
battery status with a key binding. I have bound this to:
C-t B
The default key binding to show the date and time is C-t a
So, during the relative short intermezzo using DWM I learned
to appreciate putting applications on a specific tag, and
the same workflow can be recreated in Ratpoison.
Ratpoison is less complicated than DWM, is just installed as
a package and is configured with a simple rc-file.
