-*- outline -*- Ratpoison Frequently Asked Questions * Conceptual Questions ** Where does the name `ratpoison' come from? ** Where are the window decorations? ** So, what is wrong with the mouse? ** Why can't I move the windows around? There's no point. * Usability & Customization Questions ** The Gimp is impossible to use under ratpoison! ** How do I bind a command to a single keystroke? Pressing C-t is too much work for you, eh? There are plenty of 3rd party programs that you can look into. xbindkeys seems to be a good choice. Use ratpoison's -c command-line argument to send a command to ratpoison. ** What about workspaces? Windows can be divided into different groups. Each group of windows has a number and optionally a name. With a bit of glue code, you can create workspaces. ** Can I save and restore frame configurations? Yes you can! Look at fdump and frestore. ** How do I get rid of that 1 pixel border around some of the windows? Put this line in your .ratpoisonrc file: defborder 0 ** I want feature XYZ What you want is probably already in Emacs. If you don't use Emacs, start. If do use Emacs, use it more. If you *still* can't do what you want to do, you probably shouldn't do it. If you're stubborn enough to keep trying, patch ratpoison and post the patch on the mailing list. Don't forget to read the README.developers file. ** Xinerama doesn't work well with ratpoison. If you have 2 monitors that have different dimensions, then problems can arise. You've probably noticed ratpoison disregards the dead space on your setup. To get around this you can use the 'frestore' command to fool ratpoison into avoiding the dead space. Say you have one monitor at 640x480 and another one at 1024x768. The smaller monitor occupies 0-639 horizontally and 0 480 vertically. the bigger one occupies 640-1663 horizontally and 0-768 vertically. +----------+--------------+ | | | | | | | 640x480 | 1024x768 | | | | | | | | | | +----------+ | | | | |dead space| | +----------+--------------+ In your .ratpoisonrc, add this line: frestore 0 0 0 640 480 0 0,1 640 0 1024 768 0 0 Now you have 2 frames one occupying the first monitor and 1 occupying the second one. The problem arises when you run the command 'only' (bound to C-t Q), which removes all the frames and creates one big one. Then your nice frames will disappear. You can rebind C-t Q to the above command: bind Q frestore 0 0 0 640 480 0 0,1 640 0 1024 768 0 0 You'll notice the only problem with this is that the frames won't have any windows in them. Writing a script to extract the current window and place it in one of the frames is an exercise left to the user. Note: I don't use Xinerama and haven't verified that this works. But I'm confident that it would.