Here's a screenshot. rpbar is the small bar at the bottom.

The 'default' way to switch windows in Ratpoison is to press C-t-w to get the window list, find the number of the window you want to switch to (let's say it's 2), and press C-t-2 to switch. rpbar is a simple taskbar that gives a permanent display of the windows in the current group in order to make the first C-t-w unnecesary. As a concession to The Rat, clicking on a window title will select that window. This is useful for one-handed window selection.

The main inspiration is the simple task bars you get in other minimalistic window managers such as Awesome or wmii. rpbar's appearance is modeled on these task bars.

The other inspiration is ratbar.pl. rpbar does less that ratbar.pl, but does it better. As far as I can tell, ratbar.pl uses polling to update its window list. This makes it unresponsive, which is very annoying. rpbar uses Ratpoison's hook feature to refresh as soon as you select windows, close windows, change groups, etc. It's not as fast as it would be if it were part of Ratpoison, but it's pretty usable.

rpbar is a pretty simple C++ project. It consists of two executables:

• rpbar runs in the background. It gets the window list from Ratpoison and displays it using the Xlib library.
• rpbarsend sends a message to rpbar, telling it to refresh its window list. It should be invoked by Ratpoison hooks.

Obviously, you should have a working g++ toolchain. You'll also need Xlib and Xft. If you're using Ubuntu or Debian, what you need is in the build-essential, libx11-dev and libxft-dev apt packages. Then you should:

1. Type make to compile.

2. Put rpbar and rpbarsend in your path.

3. Add the following to your .ratpoisonrc:

    # tell ratpoison to ignore rpbar
    unmanage rpbar
    # leave space for bars
    set padding 0 14 0 14
    # start rpbar 
    exec rpbar
    # hooks
    addhook switchwin exec rpbarsend
    addhook switchframe exec rpbarsend
    addhook switchgroup exec rpbarsend
    addhook deletewindow exec rpbarsend
    # RP versions >= 1.4.6 (from the git repo) have these hooks.
    # Recommended!
    # addhook titlechanged exec rpbarsend
    # addhook newwindow exec rpbarsend
   

4. Restart Ratpoison or manually execute rpbar (it should run in the background).

Now, what if you don't like the colors? The font size? The bar height? Right now, the only way to change them is changing settings.hh and recompiling, a la dwm. I know, it's unfriendly. I'll eventually add the capability to read a config file at startup and/or take command line arguments.

• horgh for revamping font drawing with Xft

I consider rpbar to be alpha. Maybe beta. It's "good enough" for my daily use, but it's pretty rough in the edges. Caveat emptor.