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This evening, the R31 booted again with a nicely lit display, which can be read effortless. So that is great.
I have no new experiences to report, so in this post I will tell a bit more about my current setup.
Of all machines I have used with the ratpoison window manager, this one has the most simple setup.
My plan for this edition of the Challenge was to do as much as possible with Emacs. Before the challenge I was already using Emacs for email, use-net, RSS-feeds and following mailing lists, as well as browse the Gemini- and Gopher space.
I knew that the big browsers like Firefox were not going to work, so expected to use eww, the web browser in Emacs.
A couple of weeks before the Challenges, I played a bit with "rde", which is a Linux distribution based on Guix, focused at developers and power user. It is developed by the brilliant Andrew Tropin.
It offers a tiling window manager, and when you request a new terminal, it opens a window with new instance of Emacs. Using rde was a great inspiration for me, and the simple ratpoison setup is one of the side effects from that.
For rde, see:
In the past, I always have set the prefix of ratpoison to Ctlr-z.
Lately, I have been experimenting with the default prefix for both tmux and ratpoison, so Ctrl-b for tmux (and not Ctrl-a), and Ctrl-t for ratpoison.
I was surprised by how quickly I got used to this change.
This is my $HOME/.ratpoisonrc:
set border 0 bind e exec /usr/local/bin/emacs bind d exec /usr/local/bin/scrot -d 4 bind w exec ~/bin/window
That is all :)
Scrot is for screenshots, the "-d 4" gives a delay of 4
seconds.
The "set border 0" line I just copied from another .ratpoisonrc file.
$HOME/bin/window is a small script that uses awk and ratmen to create a textmode popup menu to select and jump to a window:
#!/bin/sh
ratpoison -c 'windows %l;%n;%t' | sort -nr | \
awk -F';' 'BEGIN{ printf "ratmen "} \
{ printf "'\\\"'%s: %s'\\\"' '\\\"'ratpoison -c '\''select %s'\'''\\\"' ", \
$2, $3, $2 }' | sh
My .xsession is also a very simple setup:
#!/bin/sh export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 export LC_MESSAGES=C setxkbmap -model thinkpad -layout nl -option caps:ctrl_modifier xrdb load $HOME/.Xresources xsetroot -solid black & xmodmap -e "keycode 234 = Prior" xmodmap -e "keycode 233 = Next" export ENV=$HOME/.kshrc xterm -T tmux -e "/usr/bin/tmux" & /usr/local/bin/unclutter & ratpoison
The xmodmap lines are there to make the two keys left and right of the arrow-up key function like Page-up and Page-down.
unclutter is a fine tool, that warps the mouse-pointer out of sight. This is my usual setup that I use with ratpoison, I don't know if it would change much on this laptop, because the mouse it not working.
Prahou inspired me to use links+, which can show pictures when invoked as "links -g".
During the Challenge I mainly use it to look at screenshots and other stuff mentioned in the IRC channel, and to access Honk, the ActivityPub server I am running.
For prahou, see his phlog:
Hashtag: #oldcomputerchallenge
$Date: 2023/07/14 21:12:05 $
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