Episode: 931
Title: HPR0931: The ratpoison window manager
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0931/hpr0931.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:06:14

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Hi everyone, I've been a listener of Hacker Public Radio for a long time, but I never
really had any thing to contribute or anything that I thought was worth contributing, but
I was listening to some older episodes, and I came across an episode with Clotu, a few
or sixty-four, and a few other hosts that were doing a desktop challenge, basically this
which desktops for a week, and then they reported on their findings in the next episode.
This sort of inspired me to venture out and try other desktops, but first I'll give you a
little background. My name, I go by root outcast on free node, so I guess that's what I'll
go by here as well. I am visually impaired, and I have enough vision to where I don't need to
use a lot of accessibility features, such as text-to-speech for any of that, but I am always kind
of interested in new ways of interacting with Linux with my applications and things that I
use every day, and that's one of the cool things about Linux is all the customization options
that you have. That's one of the reasons I really like it, but on to why I'm talking right
now, I was listening to this episode, and Clotu was talking about his experience with
Rat poison, and one thing I really liked about it was that you didn't use the mouse to interact
with the windows on your desktop. It's basically a Thailand window manager, so you can use the
keyboard to manipulate your desktop applications, which I thought was really cool, because I have
the vision to where I don't really use a lot of accessibility features, but looking trying
to track down where the mouse is on the screen does get rather annoying, so basically if I can avoid
having to do that, it helps tremendously. Before this, at that point, I was using Fluxbox,
and I really like Fluxbox, but again, the tracking down the mouse does get annoying, so I thought
I'd give Rat poison a try. I've been using it for quite a while now, and I really like it. Basically, I found
a tutorial for setting it up, and I'll actually put it in the show notes, but the tutorial
basically goes over remapping your caps lock key to be your escape key, because the default escape key
in Rat poison, I believe it's Control-T. Rat poison by default uses Emacs like key bindings,
and this tutorial recommends remapping your caps lock key to be your escape key, and I never use caps lock
anyway, so I figured why not. Then it goes into detail about basically setting up your keys
to manipulate your environment to be more like Vim key bindings, so to split your windows,
horizontally, it's in my case it would be caps lock J, and I won't go through and give all the
commands in everything, because that's not really very exciting listening, but I just always found it
interesting how different people use their desktops and how they work float from day to day,
in my case, since switching to Rat poison, I've tried to get away from a lot of gooey applications and use more
terminal-based things, for example, I don't really have a graphical file manager installed, I just use LS
for looking through directories and things, and it's really helped me kind of appreciate the file system
a little more, I tend to, it's easier for me to find things, but I hope this hasn't been
too boring, I guess I'll see you on the free-no network.
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