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[RP] New user questions & suggestions
From: |
Phil Endecott |
Subject: |
[RP] New user questions & suggestions |
Date: |
Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:15:03 +0100 |
Dear All,
I have just bought myself an ASUS Eee and I think that even those
people who use a regular GUI system on a desktop machine will
appreciate the benefits of ratpoison (and its ilk) on its small
screen. I have been spending a while setting it up to my tastes and I
would like to ask a few questions and make some suggestions, if that's OK.
1. I don't seem to be able to get the "source" command to work from
inside my .ratpoisonrc file. Am I doing something wrong? Where do
error messages during .ratpoisonrc parsing go?
2. It would be great if the documentation either listed the default
keybinding for each command in the command index, or listed the command
name for each keybinding in the default key bindings page. Or
alternatively if there were some way to get a running ratpoison to dump
its current keybindings.
3. I decided that rather than the C-t prefix I'd use one of the
otherwise-useless extra modifier keys. I chose the one to the right of
the keyboard with a menu symbol on it. I set this up by putting this
in my .xmodmap:
keycode 117 = Hyper_R
add Mod3 = Hyper_R
Then I had to replicate all of the existing root-keymap bindings in a
new top-keymap with the H- modifier. It would be been great if I could
have dumped the existing keybindings, and piped them through sed or
awk, to do this. But doing it by hand was a good way to discover all
the commands I suppose. Anyway, pressing e.g. Hyper-0 seems a lot
simpler than C-t 0, especially on this cramped keyboard.
On my desktop system I have one of the other modifier keys (the Logo
key to the left of the spacebar) set up to launch terminals on various
machines. With shift it makes it a root terminal, and I use different
colour schemes for the terminals to make them easy to recognise (it
could be a bad mistake to run a command on the wrong machine!; I use
reverse-video colour schemes for root). So I have now set this up in
ratpoison; it works well and it's a technique that I recommend:
definekey km s-x exec x-terminal-emulator -bg lightblue ssh xylophone
definekey km s-X exec x-terminal-emulator -fg white -bg blue ssh address@hidden
4. It took me some trial and error to work out that I should write s-X
and not s-S-x. The docs list S as the modifier for shift.
5. Say I have four terminals running in four frames. If I want to
"zoom in" to one of them I can "only" it. But I don't see a way to
"zoom out" again, i.e. I can't undo or otherwise reverse the "only"
command. Also, maybe I'd like to really zoom in (i.e. increase the
font size). I could imagine tiling the window with small terminals,
and then zooming in so that the other terminals are still in the same
relative positions but off the screen. Does that make any sense to
anyone? Maybe it's not a ratpoison thing, but I think it could still
be useful especially on small screens.
6. Totally off-topic: if anyone knows how to change the font size that
Firefox uses for its menu bar and status bar, or better still how to
get rid of the menu bar entirely, I'd love to hear from you! All those
wasted pixels.....
Thanks for reading,
Phil.