Salix Forums

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
in combination with .ratpoisonrc 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..

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.

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.

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...

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