# Ratpoison

8 Hacker News commenters recommended Ratpoison and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Ultralight keyboard-driven tiling window manager that people admire for its simplicity; caveat: the last official release was around 2017.

## Why people recommend it

- Simple, elegant tiling design (2 comments): "Tiling window managers like ion, ratpoison, dwm, et. al, and the simple and elegant tooling that accompany them are a wonderful example of UI innovation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46480893)) "Ratpoison was always my favourite tiling window manager." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46189761))
- Stable, rarely needs updating (2 comments): "Simple enough to still work I'd bet, though the last official release was in 2017 or so." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46189525)) "one of those pieces of software that you can release without it bitrotting" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201337))

## What people warn about

- Last official release in 2017 (1 comments): "Simple enough to still work I'd bet, though the last official release was in 2017 or so." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46189525))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Sway](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sway.md): 81 recommend
- [i3 window manager](https://hackerapproved.com/p/i3.md): 70 recommend
- [XMonad](https://hackerapproved.com/p/xmonad.md): 28 recommend
- [i3wm](https://hackerapproved.com/p/i3wm.md): 12 recommend
- [PaperWM](https://hackerapproved.com/p/paperwm.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Ratpoison", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ratpoison/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).