pain is just fear leaving the body

i've been using my text-mode status bar hack for ratpoison for a while. it worked ok for basic stuff like the date, time, and apm status, but i wanted to be able to use some more advanced widgets without having to re-invent the wheel (which i do quite frequently).

jolan uses xfce4 so i figured i'd give its panel a try. to make ratpoison ignore it and let it move to the bottom of the screen, i just had to use ratpoison's unmanage command in ~/.ratpoisonrc:

unmanage Xfce Panel

that worked, but then every time i swapped windows, the panel would get covered up and i couldn't focus it anymore (since it's unmanaged). i hacked up ratpoison to leave 3 pixels on the bottom of the screen so the panel is always visible with the auto-hide option on. then, i made it keep all unmanaged windows at the top layer, and viola:

as a bonus, i hacked up xfce4-panel and made it respond to SIGINFO by unhiding for 2 seconds, and i have a key bound in ratpoison which runs 'pkill -INFO xfce4-panel'.