Linux – How to change the “power key” for ratpoison window manager

I am glad to see another ratpoison user. Let me tell you that I am a happy and satisfied ratpoison user and can not think of another window manager right now. It has increased my speed and productivity multiple times.

Now coming to your problem. The key conflicting part you can handle by pressing the key again after pressing the escape keycombination. e.g. I have my escape keybinding as Ctrl-a. Now if I want to select all the text or want to send cursor at the starting of line in bash I, have to press Ctrl-a then only a again after releasing escape keybinding.

For your other queries I need to do some reading.

Switching window managers is supported by all X window managers; typically it involves running them with a --replace argument, so they replace the currently-running window manager:

metacity --replace &

Depending on how your X session started, you could kill the current window manager and start a new one, but for that to work, you need to be sure that killing the window manager won't stop your X session, and you also need to be sure that the terminal you're using (xterm or whatever) will still have the focus after the window manager is gone.