I like ratpoison, but a handful of things are making me less productive than I'd like to be. I think I can improve ratpoison more easily than I can get another window manager to meet my needs [1]. This email is a statement of what I am thinking I'd like to do. It's a bit long, but if you're interested in ratpoison development, I would very much appreciate your feedback. Nearly all of this I am thinking of developing as optional behavior (but not optional compilation) so that I don't disturb existing users. (BTW, do we have any idea how many users there are?)
1. Frame affinity. Windows want to stay with the frame. Closing a window should never cause the new window displayed in that frame to be something that was most recently displayed in a different frame. Currently rp seems to choose the unmapped window last recently displayed for display. (I haven't verified this in the code.)
2. Move to frame. Send the current window to a different frame. This is half of "exchange".
3. Workspace improvements. The current rpws seems broken with multiple heads. It also seems slow. Where other window managers even animate a slide from one to another, in rp I can see each window unmap and remap. I'd like to fix this. Maybe I can fix rpws, maybe I'll need to do something in rp.
4. FFM as an option. I'd like to bring the sloppy functionality into rp, which feels cleaner and should be able to fix bug 42201, which exists only because sloppy can talk to rp, but not vice versa.
5. Pull window to frame. Pull a window from wherever it is displayed (or not) to be displayed in the current frame.
6. Display all frame and window numbers as fselect currently does for frames. Do this whenever a command could potentially choose a frame or window. The display of window numbers in their frames really only makes sense with (1) frame affinity enabled.
7. Banish shouldn't necessarily for transient windows. If an open file dialog opens, don't banish the mouse.
8. Include optional mouse support (!) for moving windows, without affecting rp's ability to do all of these things without a mouse.
9. Add scripts to contrib for wifi connection, removable media mounting/unmounting, and so forth. There seems to be quite a lot of stuff that's mentioned in the wiki or elsewhere but left as an exercise to the user. Users coming to rp from gnome or kde are, I strongly suspect, too often turned away by these details that gnome/KDE handled for them.
Jeff Abrahamson
+33 6 24 40 01 57
[1] Fwiw, the window manager that comes second closest to meeting my needs is notion. It's really an amazing wm. On the other hand, its default key bindings clobber far too much and, in particular, bother emacs use. Rebinding them with lua turns out to be a bit more complicated than I expected, though doable. The other thing that annoys me with notion is the insistence on showing window headers, which is fine on my desktop but not so much on my laptop.