Kill the rodent with ratpoison
28 February 2006
According to Wordpress, it appears that this is my 100th post! Thanks everyone for visiting!
Ratpoison is my low fat desktop of choice. You can run ratpoison from all GNU/Linux/BSD/OSX systems. Ratpoison is great for not what it adds to X but for what it takes away. The keyboard is king of a Ratpoison desktop, as the name implies, the mouse is a minor feature. This fits in great, as I myself am on a misson to wean myself off the mouse to avoid the risk to my wrists.
All windows are maximised by default, and there are no meaningless title bars at the top of the windows, so the top of the Window looks a little like the Mac desktop with the menu at the top.
Control and the T key gives access to all ratpoison functions. For example to move between programs you press Ctrl+t 2 to go to the third program, since as you will probably know, in strict mathematics and computing, you start counting from zero.
I have used ratpoison for quite a while on different machines, but now I just installed it on Gentoo running on my old Apple G4 system. This time is was running on modular X, and it works fantastically, especially since I could leave out half of the modules making an even tighter system.
The ratpoison wiki is at the center of the ratpoison community. There you can find more information. Here is a quote which explains more about the motivation of ratpoison.
> "Why are people choosing to say goodbye to the rodent? Why are they settling on a command-line interface when the rest of the world has moved on to the greener pastures of graphical desktops, glittering windows, and animated Adobe(R) After Effects(R)? Are they insanely flying in the face of progress? > > No, quite the opposite, these people have mastered the HCI. They navigate the desktop with ease without having to resort to icons and pointers. The computer obeys their touch-typed instructions and provides clear feedback on a full-screen display. > > Free yourself from all the confusion over click-to-raise or sloppy-window focus. Forget about desktop decor, senseless glitter, and animations. Enjoy the extra speed of those CPU cycles that were wasted on the GUI. Say goodbye (and good riddance) to the rodent and welcome the ultimate interface to your computer..."
Screenshots
I am not really sure if 'screenshots' make sense in ratpoison, as there is no visable signs of ratpoison aside from the lack of menus. Anyway here are some screenshots out there on the Web, I give ten links, so by the time you read this at least one will still exist!
Firefox and some MP3s on NetBSD
Early version of Firefox in Japenese
Another early Firefox and Xmms
1 Ian Gibson says...
How does wmii stack up in comparison to ratpoison? Have you tried it in order to make a comparison?
Posted at 2:55 a.m. on March 19, 2006
2 fbehemot says...
Well, WMII has the advantage of being lightweight, console-biased, and great to use in general, much better than Ratpoison, imho. See for yourself: [http://wmii.de/]
Posted at 10:29 a.m. on March 29, 2006
3 David Lee says...
wmii is like ratpoison mixed with vim. It has a lot more features, insofar as something so minimalist can be said to have features, but all of them are executed with a surgical zest for efficiency and usefulness. It is slightly less minimalist than ratpoison in that a mode where windows act as (draggable) windows is available (though they are tiled by default), and panes have titlebars by default. It also supports multiple desktops which IIRC ratpoison doesn't -- i may be wrong on this.
I've recently switched from ratpoison to wmii becuase the UI decisions make so much _sense_. I highly recommend taking a look at wmii if you like the vibe of ratpoison.
Posted at 5:38 a.m. on April 2, 2006
4 Deifl says...
If you like wmii you should also give a look to dwm.
Posted at 9:02 p.m. on November 21, 2006
5 astrowoman says...
So my sister is 10 years old, and has been addicted to board games lately. She asks me like 5 times a day to play the game Life with her or Apples To Apples. So it got me this idea to make this thread.
I would like to know what is your favorite board/card/dice/etc. game, and what was your favorite board/card/dice/etc. game as a child?
My favorite board game is Clue, cause it is not like other board games in my opinion and keeps me entertained. I loved Clue as a kid, and I still do. Other games I enjoy are Uno and Apples To Apples.
Posted at 1:07 a.m. on April 21, 2009