mystery and legend would become history and science

i've been using this archaic window manager called ratpoison for the past year because i hate using a mouse and am so much more efficient using just the keyboard. for example, to launch an xterm from whatever i'm doing, it's a simple raise-of-the-pinky and hold down control (it's where the caps lock key usually is next to 'a') and tap the 'a' key with my ring finger. then let go of both keys, press the 'c' key with my index finger, and an xterm opens. i do what i have to do, and hit control+d to exit tcsh and close the window. the whole process is second nature to me and i don't have to find applications in an obfuscated menu tree, resize windows, or move them around so they don't overlap.

anyway, because the managed windows take up the entire screen, i wrote silly little macros, if you will, to do common things like show a calendar with the time or the current apm status in a little popup window in the upper right corner that would automatically go away after a few seconds. they were useful, but i didn't like having to constantly bring them up if i was waiting for a certain time, or concerned about my remaining battery power.

so, i went to town on the ratpoison source and modified the window that would usually pop-up in the upper right corner to be a permanent window that resides on the bottom of the screen (as you can see in the screenshot up thar). ratpoison uses a screen width less the height of that bar, so all of the windows it manages will not overlap it. i then wrote a small perl script that runs forever and updates the display every so often with the time, date, memory, and apm status. i had it reporting the bandwidth usage of certain interfaces, but the continuously-updating text kept distracting me.

...now that i look at my screen as an image, i can't believe that i've managed to strip color out of every application i use. epic, mutt, vim, etc. i'm only using bold characters for colors... weird.

anyway, all of this is to mimic screen's 'hardstatus' feature, so maybe i'll clean up the code and make it a configurable option for ratpoison.