Live data from Hacker News

St – A simple terminal implementation for X

st.suckless.org

1–10 of 223 posts

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#4
post #2

Why do people care so much about terminal emulators and their supposed "bloat" and "complexity"?

There have been many times when vim starts glitching out or something because of the terminal emulator I'm using. Even well tested ones like X-term and gnome-terminal. I never had that problem using st.

We hack so much into a text interface it's really easy to accumulate bugs.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#5
I like the principles behind its design, but not supporting scrollback and saying "that functionality should be provided by tmux or something similar" is baffling when it's done in the name of removing bloat and complexity.

Not everybody wishes to use a terminal multiplexer in all cases, either.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#6

I used st for a good year and it worked really well! I've switched recently for features like the ability to change the font size without recompiling, etc. Despite its spartan feature set, st is quite usable.

What do you use now? Keyboard shortcut for font size change is a must for me.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#8

I used st for a good year and it worked really well! I've switched recently for features like the ability to change the font size without recompiling, etc. Despite its spartan feature set, st is quite usable.

What do you use now? Keyboard shortcut for font size change is a must for me.

"Keyboard shortcut for font size change is a must for me."

From the st man page:

       Alt-Shift-Page Up
              Increase font size.

       Alt-Shift-Page Down
              Decrease font size.

       Alt-Shift-Home
              Reset to default font size.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#9

I like the principles behind its design, but not supporting scrollback and saying "that functionality should be provided by tmux or something similar" is baffling when it's done in the name of removing bloat and complexity. Not everybody wishes to use a terminal multiplexer in all cases, either.

Different people want different features. There's no way they're going to remain minimal and please everyone.

They have to choose the feature set, and if other programs can provide a feature that some users want, that seems like a feature ripe for pruning. I think they made the right choice.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#10

I used st for a good year and it worked really well! I've switched recently for features like the ability to change the font size without recompiling, etc. Despite its spartan feature set, st is quite usable.

You don't have to recompile st in order to change fonts. You can just pass it the -f flag with the font you want to use.
Post reply on HN