Dual head: fvwm + ratpoison

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1

Hello,

I am having issues trying to make fvwm and ratpoison work together. I can’t really say where the problem lies and I have no idea if it is fvwm that is the culprit. This is just a pure x-based dual head configuration. No xinerama, no twinview.

I use fvwm in the main head. But I have a smaller one I’d like to use with moc and some monitoring tools like htop, ntop and lots of tail -f’s. I could as well use fvwm on that head with urxvt + screen. But I wanted to try ratpoison and this seemed a good way to do it, since I will be using only text based programs on that head.

All is working fine, and I have one wm on each head. I use that .xinitrc for this purpose:

#!/bin/bash
while true
do
        case "$1" in
        ratpoison)
                ratpoison -d:0.1 -s1
                continue
                ;;
        wmii)
                DISPLAY=":0.1" wmii
                continue
                ;;
        fluxbox)
                fluxbox -display :0.1 -screen 1
                continue
                ;;
        *)
        FVWM_USERDIR=$HOME/.fvwm0 fvwm \
                -s -d :0.1 -f ~/.fvwm0/config
                continue
                ;;
        esac
done&

FVWM_USERDIR=$HOME/.fvwm dbus-launch --exit-with-session --sh-syntax \
        fvwm -s -d :0.0 &>~/logs/fvwm.log 2>&1

As you see, it just defaults to fvwm if I just use startx. And it will boot any other wm if a case clause is included for it. So, I just fire up “startx ratpoison” to get fvwm+ratpoison".

The problem is that, even if both wm’s load ok (I can perfectly see the slim ratpoison interface loading and the background also sets ok from .ratpoisonrc) ratpoison seems not to react to key bindings, like C-t ?, which is a built-in. Further tests, showed that those bindings are going to fvwm. I can’t explain why, since the mouse is on the ratpoison screen, and the focus should be there as well.

I am suspecting it is indeed some kind of weird focus issue. Changing focus policy on fvwm did nothing (as I already suspected beforehand).

I tried to open a terminal on ratpoison (which I have configured to C-t t) and to my surprise, a new tab was spanwned instead on the seamonkey session on the fvwm desktop (the pointer continues on the ratpoison desktop). So, having no way to send key strokes to ratpoison, renders it completely unusable.

I don’t really know if this is an fvwm, ratpoison or X thing, or where to start looking for info. For now, Googleing has probed unsuccessful. I will continue…

Thanks in advance for any help.

2

This is where xscope and xev come in useful so you can see which events are being generated and sent where – especially in the case of xscope.

– Thomas Adam

3

Thanks for the tip, Thomas. For now I am just using fvwm+fvwm. On the second head I really don’t need anything special. It will just host 3 pages with htop, moc and mtail.

I downloaded and compiled xscope ok. I still need to figure out how it works, so I will probably start studying its man page.

I don’t know if this is an fvwm or ratpoison thing (by the way, wmii has the same problem).

Thank you.