Ratpoison

Ratpoison is a tiling window manager modelled after screen. The main philosophy under ratpoison is to manage the windows without using a mouse (what the name reflects). Being written in C, it is extremely light-weight and fast.

Installation
Install :

Starting
You need to edit ~/.xinitrc and add there the following line:

Startup file
Being a simple window manager, ratpoison barely needs any configuration. However, some settings can be adjusted to your liking by editing ratpoison's startup file.

On startup ratpoison runs commands found in the file ~/.ratpoisonrc. This file contains key bindings and programs that need to be run with ratpoison. Here's an example of ~/.ratpoisonrc

Usage
As ratpoison is modelled after screen, users accustomed to screen will easily manage to use it. Each command begins with a control-t (abbreviated C-t from now on), and is followed by one other keystroke. The simplest way to get to know the commands is to press C-t ? This will open a help window containing the most common key bindings.

Most commonly used keys:


 * C-t C-c - Execute xterm
 * C-t !   - Spawn a shell executing shell command, usually an application, such as C-t ! firefox
 * C-t k   - Close the current window
 * C-t b   - Banish the rat cursor to the lower right corner of the screen. The next step would be to unplug the rat from the computer altogether.
 * C-t C-t - Switch to the window that was last accessed but is not currently visible
 * C-t s   - Split the current frame into upper frame and a lower frame. By default, split in halves.
 * C-t S   - Split the current frame into left frame and a right frame.
 * C-t r   - Resize the current frame interactively by pressing  and  keys. Hit  when you're done.
 * C-t R   - Remove the current frame and extend some frames around to fill the remaining gap.
 * C-t :quit - Run before exiting ratpoison
 * C-t a   - Output current data and time
 * C-t C-g - Do nothing and that successfully

Tips
By default, ratpoison only has one workspace. Add this line to your ~/.ratpoisonrc in order to create six workspaces.

You can switch between them with +, +, etc.