Re: [RP] New to ratpoison - some questions

[Kipling Inscore]

On 11/24/07, Nathan Huesken <address@hidden> wrote:
> - I have to monitors setup with nvidia-twinview. My second monitor has a
> big blind spot on the top left corner. Can I somehow tell ratpoison to
> avoid this area?
> - I would like to see permanent status information, like the time, new
> mails in my inbox and in case of my laptop the battery charge status.
> What´s the recommended way to have this?
> It would be best, if the area of the screen, which is unusable because
> of the blind spot could be used for status information.
> I do not know how to explain, so I made a picture illustrating what I
> want: http://www.lonely-star.org/rat.png

Ratpoison has no built-in facilities for displaying system status information,
as that's not a window management task. There are many programs that do this,
including gkrellm, GNUstep applets, Gnome applets, KDE applets...
If you can tell the status program to request the position and size
you want it to
be (generally this is done with a "-geometry" command line argument), you can
have ratpoison ignore the window by name

'unmanage [name]', replacing '[name]' with what you get after the first two
characters from 'windows' (C-t w) eg 'unmanage gkrellm'

and set a padding on the left of your screen

'padding left top right bottom', eg 'padding 64 0 0 0'

These commands can be entered manually at ratpoison's prompt (C-t :) or run
automatically at ratpoison's launch in '~/.ratpoisonrc'. You can launch your
status information program from '~/.xinitrc' (or equivalent) or with 'exec' in
'~/.ratpoisonrc' if you prefer it only launching when ratpoison is your window
manager or if your system doesn't use something like '~/.xinitrc'.

There are other options but they are either problematic in some way or I don't
know how to do them correctly. Someone else might have a different method to
suggest.