Re: [RP] load frames and xterms on startup

[Oleg Katsitadze]

On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 10:03:55AM +0100, Christian Kieft wrote:
> I cannot figure out how to load apps into my frames on startup.

Well, that's not easy, at least I haven't found an elegant way of
doing it.  Of course, if anybody knows a better way of doing
something, tips are more than welcome.  This is what I do:

My .xinitrc looks something like:

------------------------------>%------------------------------
ratpoison&
rppid=$!
sleep 2 # Wait until ratpoison starts up.  Might need to be
        # adjusted.  Without this delay, (some of) the apps
        # I run below won't start up.

[Any shell command you like]

wait $rppid
------------------------------%<------------------------------

Now, in the `[Any shell command you like]' section I do something like
the following:

------------------------------>%------------------------------
# Start all apps.
app1&
app2&
...

# Wait until ratpoison catches all apps (set LOG to a log file --
# useful during debugging).
for app in app1 app2 ...; do
    while ! { ratpoison -c windows | grep '[-*+]'$app'$' > /dev/null 2>&1; }; do
        echo "Waiting for app $app to start up..." >> $LOG
        sleep 1;
    done
done

# Restore the frameset from a dump.  Create `~/.ratpoison/frames' with
# ratpoison's command "fdump", after manually creating and resizing
# the frames the way you like.
ratpoison -c "frestore `cat ~/.ratpoison/frames`"

# Empty all frames (NUM_FRAMES should be set to the number of frames).
for i in `seq 0 $((NUM_FRAMES - 1))`; do
    ratpoison -c "fselect $((i++))" -c "select -" > /dev/null
done

# Assign each app to its frame.
i=0
for app in app1 app2 ...; do
    ratpoison -c "fselect $((i++))" -c "select $app" > /dev/null
done
------------------------------%<------------------------------

The above is just an outline of the actual script.  The actual script
is much more complicated, because I'm creating several workspaces,
each with a dock and dockapps.  The script is (I think) too hairy and
ad-hoc to be useful for somebody else, but if anybody is interested I
can post it (actually "them" -- there are several scripts involved).

Final note -- I do the setup in .xinitrc and not in .ratpoisonrc so
that I have access to the programming facilities of the shell.  But
for a simple setup it might make sense to do everything from
.ratpoisonrc.

HTH,
Oleg