What I want to do / code

I like ratpoison, but a handful of things are making me less productive
than I'd like to be.  I think I can improve ratpoison more easily than I
can get another window manager to meet my needs [1].  This email is a
statement of what I am thinking I'd like to do.  It's a bit long, but if
you're interested in ratpoison development, I would very much appreciate
your feedback.  Nearly all of this I am thinking of developing as optional
behavior (but not optional compilation) so that I don't disturb existing
users.  (BTW, do we have any idea how many users there are?)

*1.  Frame affinity.*  Windows want to stay with the frame.  Closing a
window should never cause the new window displayed in that frame to be
something that was most recently displayed in a different frame.  Currently
rp seems to choose the unmapped window last recently displayed for display.
 (I haven't verified this in the code.)

*2.  Move to frame.*  Send the current window to a different frame.  This
is half of "exchange".

*3.  Workspace improvements.*  The current rpws seems broken with multiple
heads.  It also seems slow.  Where other window managers even animate a
slide from one to another, in rp I can see each window unmap and remap.
 I'd like to fix this.  Maybe I can fix rpws, maybe I'll need to do
something in rp.

*4.  FFM as an option.*  I'd like to bring the sloppy functionality into
rp, which feels cleaner and should be able to fix bug 42201, which exists
only because sloppy can talk to rp, but not vice versa.

*5.  Pull window to frame.*  Pull a window from wherever it is displayed
(or not) to be displayed in the current frame.

*6.  Display all frame and window numbers* as fselect currently does for
frames.  Do this whenever a command could potentially choose a frame or
window.  The display of window numbers in their frames really only makes
sense with (1) frame affinity enabled.

*7.  Banish shouldn't necessarily for transient windows.*  If an open file
dialog opens, don't banish the mouse.

*8.  Include optional mouse support (!)* for moving windows, without
affecting rp's ability to do all of these things without a mouse.

*9.  Add scripts to contrib* for wifi connection, removable media
mounting/unmounting, and so forth.  There seems to be quite a lot of stuff
that's mentioned in the wiki or elsewhere but left as an exercise to the
user.  Users coming to rp from gnome or kde are, I strongly suspect, too
often turned away by these details that gnome/KDE handled for them.

Jeff Abrahamson
+33 6 24 40 01 57
+44 7920 594 255

http://jeff.purple.com/
http://blog.purple.com/jeff/

[1] Fwiw, the window manager that comes second closest to meeting my needs
is notion.  It's really an amazing wm.  On the other hand, its default key
bindings clobber far too much and, in particular, bother emacs use.
 Rebinding them with lua turns out to be a bit more complicated than I
expected, though doable.  The other thing that annoys me with notion is the
insistence on showing window headers, which is fine on my desktop but not
so much on my laptop.

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