Re: [RP] The bad old days, and the delay after hitting C-t...

[Ben Leslie]

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Ryan Yeske wrote:

> Mike Meyer <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > In looking for Eclipse in the ports, I noticed evilwm, which shares
> > with rp the desire to let users use the keyboard rather than the rat.
> > 
> > To deal with delay after hitting prefix character, they don't use
> > one. Instead, they bind all the commands to C-Alt-<thing> - which
> > brings back the bad old days of X10, when the window manager did
> > *everything* on C-Alt-<thing>, or some such, and "it took two hands to
> > drive the thing". Which was why I used NeWS instead of X10.
> > 
> > I was wondering if anyone had thoughts - pro or con - on doing things
> > that way in RP. I'm not proposing doing so, just wondering if it might
> > be worth considering.
> 
> What really needs to be done is the ability to bind toplevel keys
> arbitrarily (I did promise to implement this at some point).  And that
> includes being able to make arbitrary keys be prefix keys.
> 
> The last time we really discussed it, we spent a lot of time trying to
> figure out what the :bind syntax would look like.  I think we came to
> a conclusion, but I forget what it was, and I think that was before
> irc was logged.  One day I will implement this, unless someone else
> does first.

Ok, my hack on keylaunch now seems to have this working nicely.

Here is an example my config file. Alt-Enter will start an rxvt,
Everything after break= uses the normal C-t prefix.

key=..*Return:rxvt
break=
key=...m:rp_select_start.sh mutt right "rxvt -e mutt"
key=...e:rp_select_start.sh emacs left xemacs
key=...g:ratpoison -c "colon exec galeon -w http://www.";

I have cut all the key bind stuff out of ratpoison which is a good
thing imho. Almost all functionality has been duplicated with
a decent keylaunchrc file.

Missing functionality includes bind, unbind and help, since these
all rely on rp handling the keybindings.

The code for keylaunch is currently pretty ugly, but if anyone
is interested and actually knows how X progamming works I can 
make it available.

Cheers,

Benno