Sorry for the "vague" title, I wasn't too sure what to call this thread.

I'll start with a bit of background information. I like KDE. However, I am disappointed with the Kontact PIM suite. KMail was slow and crashing. KOrganiser seemed to force too many features upon me (this is a personal preference) and it seemed too bulky, glitchy, slow (and it did crash quite often). KAlarm seemed to crash my entire computer (lag X to an unusable state where keyboard/mouse was not responding), though this was attributed to an NVIDIA issue, and KTodo also being too bulky and slow for my needs (not to mention had a bad habit of "rearranging" my todos). KTimeTracker and KJournal were useless as I never needed them, yet I couldn't remove them from the Kontact sidebar (I've tried using them - KTimeTracker would crash, and KJournal would just be slow in general). Quassel also enjoyed lagging my system (huge amount of CPU % usage), and Amarok had a bug where the QSlider would use huge amounts of CPU and also increase CPU usage for X (I reported, and apparently it's a Qt issue - still unresolved, but assigned to upstream fixing).

Whoops. Sorry. That was a slightly unrelated rant.

Anyways, so all this gripe made me move to using CLI apps like Mutt for email, irssi for IRC, mpd for music playing (with mpc and ncmpc for a client), calcurse for calendar/todo (wonderful application), finch for MSN (well, Kopete was OK).

Now, one WM that was really great especially for lots of terminal applications was Ratpoison. Setup with your own preferable keybindings Ratpoison really sped up working with these terminals. I wonder if it is possible to have some sort of desktop type (eg now we have the folder view and desktop) which acts as a Ratpoison? Or perhaps a standalone app that can do this?

How difficult would it be? I feel that this would "bring the best from both worlds" so that it makes KDE more appealing to terminal junkies and the more minimalist users who feel that their loyal CLI apps are being appreciated.

Ideas? Suggestions? (Constructive) flames?

You can run Ratpoison in KDE, you just need to create a .desktop file and stick it wherever the Compiz ones are (I've never used it so I've never looked into it ). As for window tiling in KWin there is http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59338 .

Edit: The files for me are located in /usr/share/apps/ksmserver/windowmanagers/ . You then select your window manager from System Settings -> Default Applications.