System monitoring on Salix Ratpoison

[rrttdd]

I still think that Salix Ratpoison is a nice distribution. But all the time it has been a little bit unhandsome to use on a laptop since it was hard to monitor clock, battery status and wifi signal strength.

My current solution is letting Ratpoison start the Conky system monitor when booting up.

I added a "goto Conky window" line to my main.sh file

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"CONKY" "ratpoison -c 'select Conky'" \

in combination with .ratpoisonrc

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definekey top Menu exec ~/.ratmenu/main.sh

I get a quite direct access to the Conky window showing all important information.

I think monitoring the battery on a laptop is quite important, also when using Ratpoison. My suggestion is to add Conky to the preinstalled programs of Ratpoison and auto start it on bootup..

[mimosa]

Conky can be a resource hog, so would make a poor default for users with old hardware. Also, it's not everyone's cup of tea. The Ratpoison aesthetic is simple and bare.

[rrttdd]

Hm, I'll try to reduce the resource consumption. But nevertheless, some kind of battery monitor for laptop computers is definitely missing in Salix RP IMHO. Even a text window showing the current battery state would be a good progress.

[gapan]

You can always come up with a keyboard shortcut that will use the ratpoison echo command to show you the current battery level at the ratpoison messages area (top right).

hint: you can parse the battery level out of /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state...

[bobo]

I think what you're looking for is "ratbat", i don't use a laptop, haven't learned to use a .sh script yet, my time comes from the default: bind +a exec time.
https://github.com/jbaber/ratpoison_scripts