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St – A simple terminal implementation for X

st.suckless.org

101–110 of 223 posts

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#101
post #51

As much as I love st, I had to stop using it recently. When using a bitmap font in tmux, large amounts of text sent to stdout bring my computer to a standstill. X is using 100% of a single core. I've switched to gnome-terminal and the issue is gone.

This, along with the generally accepted notion that Gnome Terminal is one of the slowest with output, puts the whole minimalism idea under a serious question. "Do one thing, but do it well ", the saying goes.

> the generally accepted notion that Gnome Terminal is one of the slowest with output

Really? Generally accepted by who? My unscientific personal tests show that Gnome Terminal is the fastest and lightest VTE.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#102
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe they added serial line support and not scrollback. If you're going to claim bloat, serial line support definitely ranks lower on priority than scrollback.

Likely they enjoy tinkering with hardware, so they just needed the serial line support themselves.

With serial support, you definitely want scrollback, since you can't run GNU screen (or tmux for the hipsters) during a HW bootsequence.

It absolutely seems like very conflicting decisions user-experience wise.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#104
post #85
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Big part my plugins just do not work still in neovim.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#106

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.

Alacritty uses the same argument against scrollback and tabs -- that these features should be handled by something like 'tmux': https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

And then you have tabs that you can't copy from using your mouse because you wind up selecting content from multiple tabs.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#107

Interesting. I've been wanting a better terminal for some time. rxvt is super buggy, especially with clickable URLs. xfce4-terminal is better but select-to-copy is flaky and doesn't always copy the text I select. I really wanted st to work for me but something is wrong with the character sizing when using Source Code Pro (17pt) as the font. I installed this on my Arch laptop (a hidpi ThinkPad T460s) and something is…

In config.h:

  /*
   * appearance
   *
   * font: see http://freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html
   */
   static char font[] = "Liberation Mono:pixelsize=12:antialias=true:autohint=true";
Try to specify font name in this format.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#108

It really is fantastic to see a new _improvement_ on something like a terminal in 2017, that isn't written in Javascript / Coffeescript / Some other web technology that deploys 100+MB of libraries.

st has been around for a few years now. But yes, it's good to see a decent, lightweight terminal emulator being somewhat actively maintained.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, and that's perfectly ok. These people simply aren't the target audience, just like you wouldn't recommend Arch to a Linux beginner.

Not having the skills isn't the thing that should stop someone in either scenario, it's not wanting the skills. Arch is great for a beginner that wants to know how to set up their own bootloader and similar things, you can use Ubuntu for years without gaining that knowledge. Or how much C editing and compiling does the average Unix user happen to run into?

There's very little natural progression in computer use, people do things the way they know how until they decide to learn more. Think of how many time's you've seen some family member slowly select file-save without ever figuring out ctrl-s.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#110
post #70

Recompiling software to change options is utterly and totally ridiculous

Not that ridiculous from a developers perspective. All of the software I write use hardcoded constants as config. Then once the app is stable and usable by myself on production environments - and only at that point - do I consider building in a config system or at least a few command line flags. What's more, many developers (myself included) aren't afraid of jumping into someone elses code and modifying it to behave…

> Not that ridiculous from a developers perspective. All of the software I write use hardcoded constants as config. Then once the app is stable and usable by myself on production environments - and only at that point - do I consider building in a config system or at least a few command line flags.

Do you not build stuff that needs to run differently on production systems than development systems? Simple things like credentials or connection URLs.

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