Linux mouseless window manager how to#
Linux mouseless window manager software#
Linux mouseless window manager free#
Linux mouseless window manager windows#

Linux mouseless window manager software#

Once upon a time, in the magical land of Software development, there was a young developer, your humble servant, discovering Linux for the first time.

Once you get the hang of it, you might be surprised at how quickly you can work.This content originally appeared on Articles on Smashing Magazine - For Web Designers And Developers and was authored by Steven Frieson Then make it a goal to get through a whole afternoon without your mouse.

If you've never used a tiling window manager, you owe it to yourself to try at least once.

Linux mouseless window manager windows#

Other window managers like it exist, and some desktops even borrow concepts from this tradition by offering tiling features (KWin in KDE, for example, has an option to spawn new windows in tiles across the desktop). Ratpoison is a great example of an early (but current) tiling window manager. The application that once occupied the frame is sent to the background and can be reached by cycling through the windows as usual ( C-t n, for instance). This doesn't kill the application in the frame, it only removes the frame from your viewport. To remove the top-left frame entirely, use C-t R. To move that application to the top-right frame instead, press C-t Right ( Ctrl with the Right arrow key). The application moves to the bottom half of the screen, with the application that took up the bottom half moving into the top-left. If an application is in the top-left frame, and you want to move it to the lower half of the screen, then-with that application active (use C-t Tab to get there)-press C-t to enter command mode and then C-Down (that's Ctrl with the Down arrow key). For instance, suppose you have a vertical split in the top half of your screen and a single frame in the bottom half. Rearranging frames when Ratpoison has been split into several parts is done with the Ctrl key and a corresponding Arrow key. With at least one application open, you can split the screen horizontally with C-t s (that's a lowercase 's') or vertically with C-t S (that's a capital 'S'). To allow that, Ratpoison lets you split your screen into frames or tiles and launch an application within each space.

Linux mouseless window manager free#

You're free to use Ratpoison as a full-screen viewscreen, but most of us are used to seeing more than one window at a time. To cycle through all open windows, use C-t n for next and C-t p for previous. This is a toggle, like the default (at least in KDE and GNOME) behavior of a quick Alt+Tab. That means you press Ctrl+t once, and then Ctrl+t a second time. Because switching back and forth between two application windows is a pretty common task, Ratpoison assigns it to the same keystroke as your usual Ratpoison command: C-t C-t. That means if urxvt is running, and then you launch Emacs, you can no longer interact with urxvt. Switching windowsĮach application you launch takes over the entire screen by default. Type the command for the application you want to start and press Return or Enter to launch it. This provides a prompt in the upper-right corner of the screen. To start an arbitrary application in Ratpoison, press C-t and then the ! (exclamation point) symbol. I usually start with Emacs instead, because it has most of the features I use anyway, including the shell terminal and the dired file manager. The default terminal is the humble xterm, and it's available with the C-t c shortcut (I remember the c as being short for 'console'). In Ratpoison, your terminal is your exclusive gateway to the rest of the computer because there's no application menu or icons to click. The first application you probably should launch is either Emacs or a terminal. Ratpoison (and GNU Screen and Emacs) more often involve two. This may feel a little unnatural at first, because most of the keyboard shortcuts you're used to probably involve only one action. For instance, to launch an xterm window, press Ctrl+t, just as you would when opening a new tab in a web browser, then press c. Since the C-t shortcut puts you into command mode, it's expected that some other key sequence will follow. To trigger Ratpoison's command mode, you press C-t, which means that you press Ctrl+t. The Control key on your keyboard is written as C.

Linux mouseless window manager how to#

If you're unfamiliar with Emacs or GNU Screen, it can look confusing at first, so here's explicit instruction on how to 'decode' this style of notation.

Ratpoison documentation uses Emacs-style notation for keyboard controls, so I'll use the same notation in this article. That's all there is to the Ratpoison desktop. The first time you log into Ratpoison, you are greeted by a black screen with some text in the upper-right corner telling you that you can press Ctrl+t for help.