[TAG] One for Ben

[Kapil Hari Paranjape]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 09:43:24AM -0400, Ben Okopnik wrote:
> Hey, some guy on Freshmeat wrote a good article on ratpoison being the
> ultimate WM (that's what got me looking at it), and didn't get flamed.
> Lots of positive comments, actually, IIRC.
> 
> Ooops, I feel a 2-cent tip coming up. :)

You asked for it. Here it is.

Preamble:
	I got tired of spend^H^H^H^H^Hwasting my time configuring my
	window manager/desktop/themes/what have you and switched to
	"ratpoison". After a deep and productive hack I come up for
	relaxation and am faced with the pest-killer again. Can't do
	GIMP, screensavers, and the rest. How *do* I relax? Go and play
	football (soccer to some...)? No. Back to configuring my window
	manager so that it can at least be like ratpoison *some* of the
	time.

Defining the problem:
	How do I get my window manager to maximize a window without the
	handles, titlebars, buttons and all that fluff. In this window I
	might have a term with screen or emacs or mozilla (for those
	do-not-disturb browse-fests :-) why should the window manager
	care!

Answer:
	Golem: (The first WM that I learnt to do this with) Alt-z
		z is for zoom.

	ICEWM: Alt-F11 (Yes, that's all!) F11 for "Fill the screen"

	FVWM:  For a window manager that can do it all this should
	        be easy; but I haven't quite figured it out.
		There *is* fvwm-shell and that has some settings that
		are 90% of the solution. (Unsurprisingly this is my
		current UI---I *need* to figure it out!).

	Metacity+GNOME2: You can define the relevant key using the
	        window key bindings menu (there is no default binding).
		The relevant function is Toggle Maximize Window. Imagine
		the surprise on people's faces when they come and say
		"What! Are you running that pest-killer again? Give me a
		real desktop", you press a key and *wham* there is GNOME
		in all its glory (once it gets out of swap space that
		is...).

Caveats:
	Yes. I know that all this does not reduce memory usage! On the
	other hand if you work/hack for long enough all that unused stuff
	should go into swap/disk so it shouldn't bother you.

Alternate Answer:
	For those who *really* want to work 90% of the time the
	alternative is to run ratpoison with one of the frames
	containing an Xnest that runs the eye-candy window manager.
	There is one problem with this solution---no DRI for the
	eye-candy which means that GL screensavers and the like will not
	produce good results.

Regards,

Kapil.
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