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St – A simple terminal implementation for X

st.suckless.org

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Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#171

Post by chay »

kahrkunne wrote: post #59
chrissnell wrote: post #25

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…

> I would report this to the author but I don't see any way to do so. Godspeed, I moved away from all suckless software because the developers are all massive jerks. They'll ignore your bug reports unless you spend an unreasonable amount of time doing intricate debugging, and if you refuse they'll be sure to remember your name and act hostile if you ever go back into their IRC. That's been my experience with Surf and…

Well to be fair, it's in their name: suck less. It might be less, but it definitely sucks :-)

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#172

Post by dhruvmittal »

makafuro wrote: post #134
Jillboy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that most of their software is targeted towards beginner/intermediate hackers. Having to recompile /forces/ you to tinker with the source code. When I was learning how to code I would hack the shit out of my window manager (dwm), I learned a lot of C in the process. When you think about it that way, the "arbitrary limitations" on lines of code and everything else starts to make sense. I agree most of their stu…

> Their browser, surf, doesn't even support tabs as far as I can remember. There is a general tabbing frontend that allows you to tab all sorts of applications: http://tools.suckless.org/tabbed .

I've never used surf, but I really do like tabbed. It plays super nicely with most tiling window managers I've used, and lets me get the single best feature (ymmv) of i3 on xmonad.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#175

Post by contras1970 »

wtetzner wrote: post #147
woah wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like kind of a pretentious choice... they've structured their program so the config file is a .h file just so you can feel cool when you compile it to change font size?

I suspect it's not so you feel cool, but because it means the program doesn't need a parser for config files, and because it's more flexible.

parserless configuration is easily achieved with stuff like envdir: https://cr.yp.to/daemontools/envdir.html

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#176

Post by juliangoldsmith »

vog wrote: post #158
aexaey wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Also, one should keep in mind that having to apply personal patches is perfectly acceptable for suckless software. I don't get it. This patch increases the code base by merely 60 lines of code (104 insertions, 44 deletions). Is 60 lines already considered bloat, in a verbose language like C? Also, is this meant to lead to fewer complexity? Maintaining the patch separately from the code base is nothing but cumbersom…

>Is 60 lines already considered bloat, in a verbose language like C?

It's more about features. tmux and screen are widely used, so a lot of people won't need that functionality to be duplicated. Keeping extra features separate lets the users pick and choose what they want.

It's also worth noting that suckless's software is not meant for someone who wants a turnkey solution. It's meant to be customized by most every user.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#177

Post by juliangoldsmith »

contras1970 wrote: post #175
wtetzner wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's not so you feel cool, but because it means the program doesn't need a parser for config files, and because it's more flexible.

parserless configuration is easily achieved with stuff like envdir: https://cr.yp.to/daemontools/envdir.html

That just parses environment variables, instead of files.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#178

Post by omtose »

microcolonel wrote: post #63
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Termite is pretty good and bug-free in my experience.

Plug: I maintain a fork of termite which doesn't require Daniel's patched VTE3 fork; and guts most of the exotic vimmy features. I really like VTE's behaviour; even if the performance is a bit worse than XTerm (though worlds ahead of what I've seen on OSX with iTerm2 and Terminal.app). I rely on using iBus input methods in the terminal on a daily basis, and VTE handles this wonderfully. https://github.com/xorgy/termi…

I've also gutted a lot of stuff from termite in my own fork (overaly, vi mode, clickable urls) and it definitely makes for a lovely minimalistic terminal. I'm thankful for termite being so simple (granted the lifting is done by a lib) that this is possible without much effort.

I just wish I could log the scrollback buffer so that I could open an actual editor on it, but I don't think libvte exposes anything to do this.

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#179

Post by welterde »

xterm's support for the Tek graphics terminal is actually quite neat, since you can use it with for example gnuplot to plot things over a (bad) SSH connection.

Also there is still some niche software that still requires it (for example IRAF which sadly is still going strong in the astronomy community).

Re: St – A simple terminal implementation for X

#180

Post by datenwolf »

welterde wrote: post #179

xterm's support for the Tek graphics terminal is actually quite neat, since you can use it with for example gnuplot to plot things over a (bad) SSH connection. Also there is still some niche software that still requires it (for example IRAF which sadly is still going strong in the astronomy community).

Indeed it is and not just for that. When I developed the firmware for our my company's laser product I exhaustively used the Tek graphics support for debugging purposes. Kind of neat if you've got only a serial connection and have to plot graphs. Much better than dumping it into a file and plotting it with gnuplot.
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