Salix Ratpoison

[xhack]

Hey.

So I've been working on getting an older box up and running for a while and have had my eye on trying out Salix Ratpoison on her as soon as she was ready to go. So far, I'm loving it. With the exception of maybe two minor niggles, it's exceptionally well put together so, thanks And a huge THANK YOU for not including a login manager and just letting it go straight to the console. Every time a user logs into some huge hogbeast like gdm that's 9 times the size of the window manager being logged into, god kills a kitten.



Minor niggles:
The ratmenu is awesome but why bind to "r"? The first thing I'm gonna need to do is resize a window lol Not a huge deal since I had to merge my .ratpoisonrc in anyway and rebound it to "m"

Pidgin doesn't do so well with ratpoison, but the same package also installs finch for some ncurses goodness. It would seem to make more sense to point to finch in the aforementioned ratmenu, but that's just me.

Last suggestion....for real. It would probably be a good idea to add a binding for "q" to quit. This was the stock behavior for ratpoison once upon a time and it even still says so in the man page, but it got removed for some reason. Having a way to log out without tearing down the X server and leaving all sorts of defunct processes behind is a good thing.

[mimosa]

Those keybindings are the defaults (chosen by the ratpoison devs, not Salix) and as you found, they can easily be customised.

The menu contains an option to "Quit ratpoison" under Exit. I don't understand about the defunct processes you mention - can you explain? I also wonder if ratpoison's C-t q did anything different. Again, I think removing it was an upstream decision. It's probably more trouble than it's worth, because it's too easy to do by accident. C-t Q unsplits the screen.

[xhack]

Actually r is the default for resizinga window. ratmenu itself doesn't have a default keybind. But like it's so minor it's no big deal. I see what you mean regarding the q keybind though. Didn't think of that. I never use unsplit screen myself. Deleting the screen makes the remaining screen go back to it's full size. As for the defunct processes, it happens when doing ctl-alt-backspace to kill X. It seems to be dbus and anything that dbus interacts with, gets left as a zombie process.

[mimosa]

I didn't know that the binding for 'r' had been changed for Salix. Maybe it was just too tempting for 'ratmenu'.

Do you see the same defunct processes when quiting ratpoison through the menu?

[gapan]

Thansk xhack!

* ratmenu is bound to Ctrl-t r. Resizing is done with Ctrl-t Ctrl-r. Different ones. r is for Ratmenu. It's also very close to the t key, which is the default ratpoison keybinding and so very easy to hit.
* Actually pidgin works very well for me in ratpoison. Launch it in it's own virtual desktop and split the screen horizontally. That's what I always do. No mouse is really needed anywhere.
* Having a binding for q doesn't seem like a good idea. Very easy to quit the session by accident, especially when trying to use Ctrl-t Q, or even Ctrl-t w or Ctrl-t a. You can still quit ratpoison gracefully either through the ratmenu, or by typing Ctr-t :quit.

[xhack]

Hey guys,

I see what you mean by the keybindings. It's all good. I was still having problems with defunct processes going through ratmenu as well as with :quit. All fixed now though. I wrote a short script to go through and kill off all my processes prior to calling the ratpoison quit function and then bound the script to C-t q.

Edit: Forgot to mention. I had previously run across another user who was complaining about strange messages while trying to run startx as root. Anyway, after the install I looked over the script set up for root and it's awesome. I lol'd

[mimosa]

Use the force, Luke!