[lug] Ultimate window manager

[Daniel Webb]

[Long boring ramble lies below.  You have been warned.]

I spent all day configuring the ratpoison window manager.  I've finally found
"the one".  This is like the difference between Vim and nano.  For all but a
few tasks, KDE, Gnome, MS Windows, and Mac OSX, put their energy in the wrong
place for a power user.  For most tasks I do, a single full-screen window is
the best way to work.  No widgets, no flashing interruptions, no weather
forecast, no system monitor, no clock.  Ratpoison is simple: every window is
full-screen (although if you want you can split in various ways like with Vim
or screen).  Press Ctrl-t Ctrl-(1-9) to select workspaces 1 through 9 (like
workspaces in KDE/gnome), Ctrl-t (1-9) to select window 1-9 of the current
workspace (like the windows within a workspace in KDE/gnome).  Of course there
are selection popups if you need them, but if you use your computer half as
much as I do you'll have all the locations memorized just through use (I
already know where everything is after two days).  I used to get so frustrated
with KDE because everything would go down if I restarted X, but with screen
and ratpoison, everything comes back up exactly where it was, still running
(assuming it wasn't a complete reboot of course).  With my research and hobby
stuff combined, I have about 30 windows or terminals open, several with long
simulations running, so it was no trivial task to restart KDE and get
everything the way it was after a reboot.  Stuff running on remote computers
like my simulations now come back unmolested even if I reboot (thanks to
screen).  And of course we're talking miniscule resource usage compared to KDE,
which is important for my old laptops which I use as VNC terminals.

Like screen, everything is scriptable on the command line, so you can use
bash, perl, python, etc to script it.  I've already created a clipboard
application in an hour that has 9 slots that can be cut/pasted individually or
can push/pop as a stack or queue.  So for example, if I'm emailing a news
story blurb, I can push the URL and a couple of selections without leaving the
Firefox window, then pop them all off the queue in Mutt when writing the
email.  The only time I use the mouse during that whole operation is when
selecting the parts of the story text I want to excerpt.  In contrast, I never
could get Klipper to work, and even trying usually crashed Klipper or KDE.

I also implemented keyboard macros, so that for example, Ctrl-q pages back in
screen sessions instead of Ctrl-a ESC Ctrl-b Ctrl-b.  This is the one thing
that was a huge pain, but now that it works I'll eventually post my solution
to the wiki.

For the few programs that don't work well with the ratpoison way (gimp is the
only one I know of so far), I set up workspace 7 as my old KDE which works
just like before, so there's really no downside except the configuration
learning curve.  

I'm gradually building up a list of tools that are worth investing time to
learn inside and out: so far I have a window manager (ratpoison), email client
(Mutt), web browser (Firefox), editor (Vim), database server (Postgresql), web
server (Apache).  Speaking of Firefox, there are a couple of extensions you
can add so that you almost never have to touch the mouse: Mouseless browsing
and keyconfig.  Sometimes I still use the mouse, like if I'm opening a bunch
of backgroud tabs from a Google results page, but most of the time the
keyboard is faster or the same speed.

Ramble done!