Ratpoison

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ratpoison

Ratpoison with a number of applications open
Developer:	Shawn Betts
Latest release:	1.4.0 / April 2, 2006
OS:	Unix-like
Use:	Window Manager
License:	GPL
Website:	http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/

This article is about the computer program. For the chemical rodent killer, see rat poison.

The correct title of this article is ratpoison. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

In Unix computing, ratpoison is a free minimalist window manager for the X Window System primarily written by Shawn Betts. Its UI and much of its functionality are inspired by the GNU Screen terminal multiplexer. Its name comes from the fact that it lets you manage windows without using the mouse (or "rat"[1]). Ratpoison is Free software licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Its intended successor is Stumpwm; ratpoison was growing increasingly large, and Betts decided to largely reimplement its functionality in Common Lisp.^[1]

[edit] Reference

^ "StumpWM grew out of the authors' frustration with writing ratpoison in C. Very quickly we realized we were building into ratpoison lispy-emacs style paradigms. We had a REPL hanging off 'C-t :', hooks, and a growing subset of Common Lisp in the implementation.
It was clear what we REALLY wanted was a window manager written in Lisp from the ground up with lots of room for customizing and real-time hacking." "Background" from the Stumpwm wiki