I came across dmenu while setting up Musca. This nifty utility which takes a list of strings as input and creates a menu from it. Why use it?

• Super fast in providing auto complete suggestions for the list of strings
• Better looks and more customizable than the default ratbar

It is quite easy to set dmenu for invoking shell commands(and for choosing windows too) from within ratpoison. Here’s the relevant ratpoisonrc stuff:

## Dmenu magic
# Rat shell
unbind exclam
bind exclam exec $(dmenu_path | dmenu -i -nb '#000000' -nf '#777777' -sb '#770000' -sf '#ffffff' -fn '--dina-medium-r-normal--12-------*' -p '> ')

# Rat windows select
unbind w
bind w exec $(ratpoison -c "select ratpoison -c "windows" | dmenu -i -nb '#000000' -nf '#777777' -sb '#770000' -sf '#ffffff' -fn '-*-dina-medium-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*' -p ':: ' | awk '{print $1}'")

Some good references:

• Archlinux thread: Ratpoison experience
• Batz Musca config
• Artur’s ratpoisonrc