Window managers for Windows

[Therem Harth]

Today I (re)discovered the Ratpoison window manager for X11. It is pretty much everything I want in a window manager, and makes Linux all snappy and usable and nice.

Unfortunately, I'm stuck using Windows for certain things, and while Windows NT is excellent in its own right, the GUI is not as snappy, usable, or nice as Ratpoison.

Is there any software that would let me make Windows' interface more like Ratpoison? Tiling capability would be icing on the cake, but that isn't really what I'm after - the only "required" features are
1. Key hooks (e.g. press Control-t and then some other keys to do something, instead of having a dozen keybindings getting in the way of your applications)
2. The ability to assign numbers to windows, and jump to a window by specifying the number in a key combination (e.g. C-t 8 to jump to window #8). Or even better, the ability to assign numbers to open applications so their windows could be treated as a group.

Any ideas?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Cool, ratpoison. I just wanted to mention that your Opera without GTK solution gave me an itch to go back to my earlier Blackbox setup, this time without any gtk-programs.

At the moment I use XFCE configurated to function almost exactly like Blackbox anyway. Who needs panels when you can have everything in desktop menus on mouse-click? KDE has nice configurable desktop menus too. For me it's more important to have keybindings for Vim-magic rather than for window managing.

Blackbox is available on Windows, also on 64-bit. Probably not what you want, but at least light and snappy.

Blackbox is usually used with a separate program like bbkeys for binding arbitrary commands to keys. On Windows bbkeys seems to be a plugin for Blackbox.

[Timo Pietilä]

Unfortunately, I'm stuck using Windows for certain things, and while Windows NT is excellent in its own right, the GUI is not as snappy, usable, or nice as Ratpoison.

Windows NT?? Are we talking about Microsoft Windows or some Linux add-on here?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I use Windows 2000 as my Virtualbox-Windows. Perfect low-memory Windows for building Halls of Mist for Windows and other little tasks like that. Windows NT does sound a lot more hardcore.

Off-topic but Linux-geekery all the same: Vim is awesome when used in client-server mode. My Vim is configured to function as a server, and all the text files I click in a filemanager open in that same Vim instance.

Vim server also takes commands issued from the command line. I've configured the next/previous keys on my Thinkpad to switch tabs, or with Shift to switch the text document inside the current tab. These key bindings function even when the Vim window is not active. I've also a key for opening a new tab in Vim and a couple for splitting the window vertically/horizontally. These shortcuts are really nice for making Vim ready to open yet another text file just where I want it: inside a new tab, in a new split window, replacing an older text file in an open tab, etc.

[Therem Harth]

I'm still learning Vim. I know it's supposed to be a line editor, but inability to use the arrow keys makes it *hard* to use in compatible mode. And the keystrokes are hard to remember.

("What's paste again? +gP, or something?")

Re BB4Win, is that even maintained anymore?

(Timo - I mean the Windows NT family, everything from Windows 2000 to Windows 8. Ratpoison is for Linux/UNIX, I'm looking for an equivalent for Windows.)

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Re BB4Win, is that even maintained anymore?

According to Google, bbLean seems to work well in modern Windows. The Windows port is probably fresher than the version Linux anyway.

Why should blackbox be maintained? It's "done". Since blackbox respects the standards very well, the old code doesn't get broken with newer applications. Not on Linux anyway.

[Derakon]

I'm still learning Vim. I know it's supposed to be a line editor, but inability to use the arrow keys makes it *hard* to use in compatible mode. And the keystrokes are hard to remember.

("What's paste again? +gP, or something?")

Can't help you with remembering commands, but my .vimrc (which I haven't tweaked since I was in college) lets me use the arrow keys to move across lines and so on. Dunno which of these settings does the trick, but here:

filetype on
filetype indent on

set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set softtabstop=4
"set noexpandtab
set textwidth=0
set ww=<,>,[,],~,l,h,s,b
set expandtab

colorscheme darkblue
set sts=4
set sw=4
syntax on
set autoindent
set vb t_vb=
"set tw=79
map gn o<Esc>
map gN O<Esc>
set showmatch

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Vim is funny in that every user uses a different tiny subset of commands, even for basic editing and moving around.

This might be the most interesting option in my .vimrc:

set clipboard=unnamed

It makes copy and paste use the standard X clipboard. Much easier to copy text from your browser to Vim or vice versa.