Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

St – A simple terminal implementation for X

st.suckless.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 223 posts

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#81

Post by wruza »

donatj wrote: post #55
pmoriarty wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What features do you need in iTerm2 that you find lacking in the Linux terminal emulators you've tried?

I second this out of true curiosity. I have tried and never found any love in my heart for iTerm2. It just feels clunky and bloated to me.

Last time I asked, someone said: "many features, but I like cmd-click to open path". After reading [1] I see that all it does is loading hipster-oriented "features" into your brain. Almost every feature is useless if you're doing any amount of actual work with decent cli tools. But for playing a hacker it is pretty cool.

[1] https://www.iterm2.com/features.html

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#82

Post by ori_b »

nine_k wrote: post #53
matthewbauer wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of agree. But, how often do you change your settings after you've found the right ones? A minimalist would see runtime configuration as bloat.

Finding the right settings is a relatively slow process. Also, finding the right values for 80% of the settings is fast, but fiddling with the rest can take time. Trying something new also becomes harder. For the vast majority of user-facing programs, run-time configuration is a must. A fancy GUI for it might be superfluous; a simple text file / command-line way to set options should always be available.

Compile times for me are 0.2 seconds. And there is a text file available, it's called config.h.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#83

Post by mbrock »

kitchi wrote: post #71
laumars wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're clearly not their target audience if those are your takeaways. But there are lots of people out there who do prefer to recompile instead of configure and find suckless feature sets to be inline with their own requirements. To say that a product "sucks" because they don't cater specifically to your arbitrary desires is grossly unfair.

Well, I mean that's what they're doing as well. They call features other people use and require "bloat" and pretty much say they all suck. I think it's fair to say suckless code is clean and minimalist. But it definitely isn't suckless.

I think they're not trying to be suckless, but merely to suck less.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#84

Post by buserror »

kookookabongers wrote: post #35
bonzini wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Designated initializers. It's in C99.

Thanks. Oddly not in the C++ standard: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18731707/why-does-c11-not...

Yes it's strange, it's one of the reason I stopped using C++ as a matter of fact. Given the innate amount of code required in C++ constructor to initialize objects, you'd think that would be very handy.

BTW, shameless plug, but my own simavr uses these C99 features as more or less the whole basic structure on how multiple cores are described, see a sample core declaration [0] for example. The beauty is that there is no code involved in the declaration, it'll be 'const' too. Imagine the boilerplate you'd need to do that in C++!

[0]: https://github.com/buserror/simavr/blob/master/simavr/cores/...

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#85

Post by daenney »

Gonzih wrote: post #77
jjawssd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered using neovim?

Currently neovim is not even close in stability to vim.

Based on what criteria and experiences? I've been running it for a year with a slew of plugins for example and haven't experienced a single hiccup.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#86

Post by aexaey »

ycmbntrthrwaway wrote: post #18
mikejmoffitt wrote: post #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.

Scrollback is implemented as a patch: http://st.suckless.org/patches/scrollback

This.

Also, one should keep in mind that having to apply personal patches is perfectly acceptable for suckless software. In fact, for the very same st, to change font, colour scheme, or hotkeys/shortcuts - one has to edit config.h file and recompile. There is no traditional text config file or "Preferences" menu.

This might sound bizarre at first, but actually works as well as editing a text config file: config.h is very well structured and compilation only takes fraction of a second. Better yet, you're not constrained by opinions of previous commiters on what should be configurable and what - not. Which is the whole point, actually.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#87

Post by itsadok »

pmoriarty wrote: post #36
unfamiliar wrote: post #34

I find terminal emulators on Linux to be woefully inadequate after getting used to iTerm2 on OS X. Can anyone recommend a Linux terminal emulator that even comes close in terms of features and performance?

What features do you need in iTerm2 that you find lacking in the Linux terminal emulators you've tried?

Not OP, but some cool features I haven't seen in Linux:

- Quadruple-click smart selection

- "Selection respects soft boundaries" for selecting within a tmux pane

- "Rum coprocess" on keyboard shortcut, which allows doing stuff like http://brettterpstra.com/2014/11/14/safer-command-line-paste...

I just checked, and gnome-terminal doesn't even have split-pane. What do you guys use, anyway?

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#88

Post by nightcracker »

aexaey wrote: post #86
ycmbntrthrwaway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrollback is implemented as a patch: http://st.suckless.org/patches/scrollback

This. Also, one should keep in mind that having to apply personal patches is perfectly acceptable for suckless software. In fact, for the very same st, to change font, colour scheme, or hotkeys/shortcuts - one has to edit config.h file and recompile. There is no traditional text config file or "Preferences" menu. This might sound bizarre at first, but actually works as well as editing a text config file: config.h is…

It is still bizarre because not every user wants to and/or doesn't have the skills to do that.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#89

Post by billiob »

xvilka wrote: post #61
eriknstr wrote: post #56

Personally I am enjoying terminology very much. https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology

Sadly Terminology doesn't have support for 24bit RGB sequences (true color): https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728

(main developer of Terminology here) As stated on https://phab.enlightenment.org/T746, it is not an easy move due to the way the text grid is designed.

I might work on it someday.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#90

Post by laumars »

kitchi wrote: post #71
laumars wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're clearly not their target audience if those are your takeaways. But there are lots of people out there who do prefer to recompile instead of configure and find suckless feature sets to be inline with their own requirements. To say that a product "sucks" because they don't cater specifically to your arbitrary desires is grossly unfair.

Well, I mean that's what they're doing as well. They call features other people use and require "bloat" and pretty much say they all suck. I think it's fair to say suckless code is clean and minimalist. But it definitely isn't suckless.

First of all it is "suck less" not "suckless". ie "less bloat/features" rather than "hey look at our perfect software". This is a point reiterated on their site repeatedly (including the tag on their home page: http://suckless.org/)

Secondly, it's all very tongue in cheek. After all it's aimed at the OpenBSD crowd and like minded people. It's not really meant to be taken literally by the general computing audience - not even within the wider FOSS community.

Lastly it's sad day for HN when negative comments get up-voted and positive comments defending niche software get down-voted. What happened to respecting our peers and acknowledging the massively wide range of personal preferences and usage habits?

Post reply on HN