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15 Command Line Arguments

ratpoison supports command line arguments to request various actions when invoking ratpoison.

-h, --help
Display this help screen
-v, --version
Display the version
-d, --display
Specify the X display to connect to.
-s, --screen
Specify the screen to use. By default ratpoison runs on all screens. You can tell it to use just one with this option.
-c, --command
Send ratpoison a colon-command. This allows you to control ratpoison from the command-line. with the -c option you can script ratpoison using any programming language that can spawn a process. Some commands behave differently when invoked this way. Currently the only commands that behaves differently are the windows and set commands. For windows, instead of displaying the window list in a message window, it is printed to stdout. The output can then be captured and used in the ratpoison script. For instance, this could be used to check whether a program is running and if it is switch to its window otherwise launch it.

It should also be noted that multiple -c options can be used.

to facilitate writing scripts, the RATPOISON environment variable is set to the full path of the ratpoison binary.

          $ ratpoison -c split -c split
     

Here ratpoison would split the current frame twice.

-i, --interactive
Force ratpoison to execute commands in interactive mode. This is used in conjunction with the -c option.
-f, --file
Specify an alternate configuration file. See Startup file.