-*- outline -*-
Ratpoison Frequently Asked Questions

* Conceptual Questions
** Where does the name `ratpoison' come from?

** Where are the window decorations?

** So, what is wrong with the mouse?

** Why can't I move the windows around?
There's no point.

* Usability & Customization Questions
** Hey where's the manual?
There is a ratpoison texinfo manual. type:

info ratpoison

or if you use emacs, type:

C-h i m ratpoison RET

** How do I use the gimp (or similar apps) under ratpoison?
Some programs fit more into the ratpoison paradigm than others.
Unfortunatly, the gimp can be difficult to use under ratpoison.  There
are however, several options if you must use it.

1) manually split and adjust frames to accomodate the various gimp
   windows.

2) use some scripts to automate the kinds of things you will have to
   do in (1) (some users have published these on the mailing list,
   search the archives).

3) use the (still experimental) tmpwm command to temporarily switch to
   another window manager.  Be sure to exit that window manager when
   you are finished with the gimp to return to ratpoison.

4) fix the gimp to work better with ratpoison.

** How do I bind a command to a single keystroke?
Pressing C-t is too much work for you, eh? There are plenty of 3rd
party programs that you can look into. xbindkeys seems to be a good
choice. Use ratpoison's -c command-line argument to send a command to
ratpoison.

** What about workspaces?
Windows can be divided into different groups. Each group of windows
has a number and optionally a name. With a bit of glue code, you can
create workspaces.

I've created just the glue you need. look at contrib/rpws for details.

** Can I save and restore frame configurations?
Yes you can! Look at fdump and frestore.

** How do I get rid of that 1 pixel border around some of the windows?
Put this line in your .ratpoisonrc file:

defborder 0

** I want feature XYZ
What you want is probably already in Emacs. If you don't use Emacs,
start. If do use Emacs, use it more. If you *still* can't do what you
want to do, you probably shouldn't do it.

If you're stubborn enough to keep trying, patch ratpoison and post the
patch on the mailing list. Don't forget to read the README.developers
file.

** Xinerama doesn't work well with ratpoison.
If you have 2 monitors that have different dimensions, then problems
can arise. You've probably noticed ratpoison disregards the dead space
on your setup. To get around this you can use the 'frestore' command
to fool ratpoison into avoiding the dead space.

Say you have one monitor at 640x480 and another one at 1024x768. The
smaller monitor occupies 0-639 horizontally and 0 480 vertically. the
bigger one occupies 640-1663 horizontally and 0-768 vertically.

+----------+--------------+
|	   |		  |
|	   |		  |
|  640x480 |   	1024x768  |
|      	   |		  |
|    	   |		  |
|   	   |		  |
+----------+		  |
|  	   |		  |
|dead space|   		  |
+----------+--------------+

In your .ratpoisonrc, add this line:

frestore 0 0 0 640 480 0 0,1 640 0 1024 768 0 0

Now you have 2 frames one occupying the first monitor and 1 occupying
the second one. The problem arises when you run the command 'only'
(bound to C-t Q), which removes all the frames and creates one big
one. Then your nice frames will disappear. You can rebind C-t Q to the
above command:

bind Q frestore 0 0 0 640 480 0 0,1 640 0 1024 768 0 0

You'll notice the only problem with this is that the frames won't have
any windows in them. Writing a script to extract the current window
and place it in one of the frames is an exercise left to the user.

Note: I don't use Xinerama and haven't verified that this works. But
I'm confident that it would.