Ratpoison is a Window Manager that puts that sick little rodent out of its misery.

Ratpoison is a tiling window manager for the X Window System primarily developed by Shawn Betts.

Ratpoison is a simple Window Manager with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence. It is largely modelled after GNU Screen which has done wonders in the virtual terminal market.

The screen can be split into non-overlapping frames. All windows are kept maximized inside their frames to take full advantage of your precious screen real estate.

All interaction with the window manager is done through keystrokes. ratpoison has a prefix map to minimize the key clobbering that cripples Emacs and other quality pieces of software.
If you're wondering how we came up with the name ratpoison, here is the usenet post that started it all.


Its user interface and much of its functionality are inspired by the GNU Screen terminal multiplexer.

Its name reflects a major design goal of ratpoison: it lets the user manage windows without using the mouse. Unlike other tiling window managers like Ion, ratpoison completely ignores the mouse, and avoids window decorations as much as possible.

Ratpoison is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Reception

Mark Pilgrim, a frequent user, praised it for being "minimalist" and "configurable".[5] Jeff Covey found it "lightning fast and perfectly stable".

Peter Seebach remarked that "the convenience and performance are impressive; the learning curve, however, daunts many users.

Similarly, Brian Proffitt observes that "the key commands are well explained in this window manager's man pages, and whatever you do, read these first. The keyboard commands do make sense after some use but initially the learning curve is pretty steep."

In the same vein, Bruce Byfield found it (and stumpwm) "virtually unusable until you read the documentation".

Stumpwm is a window manager intended as a successor to ratpoison, created when Betts found ratpoison growing increasingly large and "lispy". As explained on the StumpWM wiki, the developers decided to largely reimplement ratpoison in Common Lisp:

StumpWM grew out of the authors' frustration with writing ratpoison in C. Very quickly we realized we were building into ratpoison lispy-emacs style paradigms. We had a REPL hanging off 'C-t :', hooks, and a growing subset of Common Lisp in the implementation... It was clear what we really wanted was a window manager written in Lisp from the ground up with lots of room for customizing and real-time hacking.

Ratpoison is, however, just the Linux window manager some people need. It is an ultra-lite tiling window manager, very fast, and does not use the mouse for any user action. If you prefer to work primarily from the keyboard, this might be just your ticket. Note that though ratpoison doesn't use the mouse, applications that use the mouse can still do so.

Ratpoison, like Dwm, is a tiling window manager, meaning that it lets the user arrange the multiple open windows on a screen in a tile manner. The windows fit tightly together and do not overlap. It's about using up all the screen surface area with window content -- not frills. It's also about being able to quickly move between windows without use of a mouse.

Ratpoison initially presents a plain, unadorned screen to the user. There is no floating window support, no tab support, and no direct multiple workspace support. There's no title bar on the window, no icons, no buttons, and no panel. Sounds pretty grim, yes?

But ratpoison does have some interesting tricks up its sleeve, including tiling windows, window groups, and the ability to save and restore tile arrangements. The cleverly designed rpws script (for ratpoison Work Space) makes use of some of these features to provide support for a multiple workspace utility. If you decide to experiment with the ratpoison window manager, I urge you to download and install this perl script. Running rpws help will get you started on how to use rpws to augment ratpoison.

In most Linux distributions, ratpoison is easy to install. I use Debian Linux, so I was able to install by doing:  

To get the rpws script working with your ratpoison install, insert the following command into your .ratpoisonrc file:

exec rpws init 4 -k

To make this work the rpws has to be marked as executable. You may have to include the full path of rpws in the exec statement. With this addition, ratpoison will have 4 workspace available, and an alt-Fn key (where n is the key numer, like alt-F3) will move you to the respective workspace.
As an example of an ideal application for ratpoison, I have a resuscitated Old Laptop that has only about 83 megabytes of memory. The screen resolution is 800x600 tops. Yet in that old laptop I'm running the Etch version of Debian Linux. I thus am running a significant operating system on what is now considered very meager resources.

I get away with it because I use the ratpoison and dwm window managers. Both are very small in memory requirement, and both can make heavy use of keyboard commands. In fact, ratpoison makes use of only the keyboard.

You might wonder why I don't use ratpoison exclusively. The reason is because ratpoison is purely a tiling window manager. It always consumes the entire screen with whatever frames are open, and windows never partially cover one another. They can exist in side by side frames, or totally cover one another. Applications, like GIMP that desire to open multiple windows of specific size are clobbered by ratpoison's insistence on forcing windows to fit tiles.

With ratpoison, each utility window of Xephem, for example, becomes a full frame by default. You have to either page through the windows to see the various utilities, or tell ratpoison to split the windows into tiled frames and arrange the utilities into the tiled frames. That's not convenient, and not what ratpoison does well. But when you read about how to save frames and create scripts, you may see how you can conquer even those pesky multi-window applications.

For general work, ratpoison provides a very small, very efficient, and very handy environment for those who like to work primarily through the keyboard. For the instances where ratpoison is somewhat of a hindrance, I always have dwm at the ready. Dwm's resource use is as small as ratpoison's, but it can support floating windows as an option.

To use dwm for those special occasions, I can either exit ratpoison and change my .xinitrc file to run dwm, or I can stay in ratpoison, enter alt-t : and when prompted enter tmpwm dwm. This will bring up the dwm window manager, but return to ratpoison when I exit dwm.


Ratpoison Screen Control.

At left you see an example screenshot of ratpoison. You can click on the image to get a full-sized view. The screen in this example is split into 4 frames of unequal size. At upper left is an xterm showing the ratpoison info file. At upper right is xclock. At lower left is the file manager program thunar. At lower right is xosview The first thing you might notice is the unusual look of xosview. This is because ratpoison always adjusts a window's size to fit the available frame. The only way to shrink the height of xosview to give a more normal view, in this example, is to simultaneously expand the height of the xclock frame, making it distorted.

That's an example of the nature of the way ratpoison uses tiled frames. However many you set up by splitting the screen, whatever is in each frame is adjusted to fill the frame.
So that brings up a question. How do you split the screen into multiple tiled frames? That's discussed in the next segment.


Getting Around In And Controlling Ratpoison.
If you decide to install ratpoison, at first you might be quite lost. What you get when you login is a big gray screen. Where do you go next?

The first thing to do is type a cntl-t ? command. That's hold down the control key while pressing the t key, then press the ? key. That will fill the screen with the available keyboard commands. The cntl-t key is considered the command key, and precedes any other key on the illustrated help screen to accomplish the respective action. Hit Esc to escape from the help screen.

To get more information about the features and control commands for ratpoison, you should try info ratpoison. If info is installed, it will present a nice, structured help system. You can also do man ratpoison to get some information, though not as much as with the info command.
If you run a command from your big gray screen, such as xterm -e mc to open another xterm with Midnight Commander, you'll find yourself in Midnight Commander. So how do you get back to the window you were just in? It's completely covered up with the Midnight Commander window.

There are a number of ways to switch to different open windows, and to split the screen up into multiple frames. The following table shows a few of the handy commands you may want to start with to help find yourself around to all your open windows. Note that the word window is used to denote the display opened by a task, and the word frame is used to denote a tiled area of the full screen.

# cntl-t space - Switch to next window. Repeated, it cycles through all open windows. # cntl-t n - Switch to next window -- same as space. # cntl-t p - Switch to previous window. # cntl-t w - Display list of open windows # cntl-t 0-9 - Switch to numbered window (see cntl-t w). # cntl-t A - Name a window. # cntl-t ' - Switch to window by name. # cntl-t s - Split frame into upper and lower frames. # cntl-t S - Split frame into left and right frames. # cntl-t Q - Make frame full screen (close other frames). # cntl-t r - Resize current frame. Press enter when done. # cntl-t tab - Switch to next frame (if screen is split) # cntl-t ? - Get help screen. # cntl-t ! - Run a shell command.

This list is by no means a complete list of ratpoison key commands, but the help screen (cntl-t ?) and the info file will give a complete list. It is possible to change any of the commands to a sequence you find more comfortable. It's also possible to add additional commands, such as key sequences that launch some of your favorite applications. It's even possible to change the command key from cntl-t to something else (I use cntl-k).

To customize your ratpoison window manager setup, make a $HOME/.ratpoisonrc file, and make your own tailored commands. Below is a snippet of my $HOME/.ratpoisonrc file:

# Change the command key to cntl-k escape C-k # Set up easier ability to move to frames than tab bind j focus # Set up easier key to maximize window than Q (use o) bind o only # Bind x to launch a new xterm bind x exec xterm -bg grey -fg black -fn 8x13 & # Bind e to my favorite editor bind e exec xterm -e vim

These new keys now operate in conjunction with the command key to do the operations desired. For example, cntl-t x launches an x terminal. The full list of ratpoison commands that can be bound to keys is in the info file under Command Index
Download.

Screenshots.