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 command and some def* commands. 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.