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Why I Use Suckless Tools

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Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#21

Post by tarkin2 »

Macha wrote: post #4

I get that people enjoy very minimalist computer experiences, but startup time is hardly that different between these programs and other slightly more ergonomic programs which offer conveniences like a config file. If you look at my startup time for my system it goes something like this: 10s - waiting for monitor to wake up to pick OS at dual boot menu 15s - typing disk encryption password 15s - system uses disk encr…

The main thing I loved about suckless and missed on OS X was DWM. Dealing with windows, even with the tiling aspects, hammerspoon to automate things, and playing around with configs to turn off all the animation, on OS X I was still much more productive using DWM.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#22

Post by jdub »

As much as possible, I try to use software created by kind communities. The behaviours and attitudes in the "suckless" world come across as combative, exclusive, and unpleasant.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#23

Post by tdy_err »

sseneca wrote: post #17

I used st for a while but switched to kitty. kitty obviously has way more features (things like colour switching can be added to st, but requires messing with patches which I dislike, and dislike more than compiling on each configuration change). I've been using kitty for a few months now and performance is great. in fact, the biggest performance gain I saw was when I switched away from "oh my zsh" to a manually writ…

Don't tell anybody where you placed your .zshrc- it's supposed to be a secret!

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#24

Post by raspyberr »

Havoc wrote: post #2

This caters to a very specific audience though. This particular concept while labelled suckless sounds like hell to me. To change a config I need to recompile stuff? Jikes To each their own though. I can see how this could work well if one invested a mountain of time into learning & fine-tuning it all

The recompilation takes basically no time. And I think it's appropriate for something like a window manager where changes should be infrequent and the thing should be as fast and do only its job. For people who frequently change small things, this provides some friction and can be annoying to change a pixel difference and have to wait a few seconds to see the difference.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#25

Post by dhimes »

xiwenc wrote: post #7
Macha wrote: post #4

I get that people enjoy very minimalist computer experiences, but startup time is hardly that different between these programs and other slightly more ergonomic programs which offer conveniences like a config file. If you look at my startup time for my system it goes something like this: 10s - waiting for monitor to wake up to pick OS at dual boot menu 15s - typing disk encryption password 15s - system uses disk encr…

Stronger yet I rarely reboot my systems. Either they run 24/7 or I put them to sleep. There’s definitely good use for these optimized tools. Especially on old systems with low resources and slow CPU’s. I generally like the simplicity of suckless tools. dmenu together with i3 is a nice duo.

You have working sleep? Man I'm so jealous.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#26

Post by ArtWomb »

I'm on CrOS. And I feel like web based tooling is maturing to professional levels. I can give shout outs to: Piskel - for sprite generation, P5JS - texture synth and prototyping, Babylon and Three JS Editors - easy 3D modelling and scene graphs, ShaderToy - vertex and fragment shader development and debugging in webgl, Rayground - ray tracing experimentation, Nodes.io - creative coding, AudioMass - waveform manipulation. Now I wouldn't describe any of these environments as "suckless". At best maybe "experimental". But they are getting better every day ;)

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#28

Post by tutfbhuf »

rejschaap wrote: post #11
tutfbhuf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> suckless tools having their configuration baked into the executable at compile time, they start up instantly I wonder how many milliseconds slower the startup of a C application will be, when it reads a config file from SSD first.

Yeah, reading a single file will not have a noticable impact, but we all know it will not stop at a single file. Before you know it a full blown web browser is included. The suckless philosophy is pretty extreme, but I'm grateful there are people exploring this space.

> it will not stop at a single file. Before you know it a full blown web browser is included

There are real world examples like bspwm (my favorite window manger), that proves you wrong. It is configurable via config file and is as "suckless" as it could be.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#29

Post by black_puppydog »

Havoc wrote: post #2

This caters to a very specific audience though. This particular concept while labelled suckless sounds like hell to me. To change a config I need to recompile stuff? Jikes To each their own though. I can see how this could work well if one invested a mountain of time into learning & fine-tuning it all

On the other hand, compiling these applications is also near-instant and literally just requires executing "make", another thing they are quite good at. Small application small build system.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#30

Post by simias »

Macha wrote: post #4

I get that people enjoy very minimalist computer experiences, but startup time is hardly that different between these programs and other slightly more ergonomic programs which offer conveniences like a config file. If you look at my startup time for my system it goes something like this: 10s - waiting for monitor to wake up to pick OS at dual boot menu 15s - typing disk encryption password 15s - system uses disk encr…

I don't see why you're focusing on speed (does the author even mention it? I skimmed TFA and didn't find it mentioned). Less bloat, simpler code means fewer bugs and it means that it's easy for a hacker/power user to dig into the code to understand and modify it, that's the killer feature. After one hour poking into DWM I understood how it worked and how I could modify it to fit my needs exactly.

I use a bunch of suckless tools, in particular DMW. I don't necessarily agree with all their choices but for me it's about configurability and reliability. I consider myself a power user, I know how things work, I don't need a gui to configure my keyboard or network interface. I don't want daemons running in the background and overwriting the settings I apply manually with the command line (a common issue I have with more fully fledged "desktop environments").

Ergonomics easily win too, sure I have to mess with C code to get the config I want, but then it's basically tailor-made vs. ready-made. All the functions I use the most are one key keystroke away, I use the mouse so little that I often find myself searching for it because it ended up buried underneath some papers. I want to focus the terminal? Win-C. I want to focus Vim? Win-E. Firefox? Win-w. I have special customization to sticky windows the way I like, placement rules etc...

Everything is fast, reliable, no pointless transitions, no cruft, no having to worry about the next update changing a behaviour that I use and me having to figure out how to revert the change or relearn how I do things. >I don't see the marginal benefit of maybe 4s at boot time being worth that hassle.

Before I used DWM I used StumpWM for more than a decade, an other tiling WM. Being written in Common Lisp it was quite slow to boot up from an image dump (especially 10+ years ago on HDDs and vastly less powerful CPUs). For me performance is highly irrelevant, the "hassle" is what I'm in it for. It's like learning to touchtype, at first it's immensely frustrating but once you're past the learning curve it gets really beneficial. Digging throw DWM's code is harder than clicking on Gnome's menus, but once you've got it working exactly like you want you probably won't have to touch it for a long while.

The last significant change I made to my DWM fork dates from July 27 2018. Since then I've only tweaked a couple of keybindings.

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