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

Why I Use Suckless Tools

christine.website

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 215 posts

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#81

Post by lloeki »

jai_ wrote: post #69
allis10 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accusations of "elitism" being what they may, the name is in fact a slice of humility: they advertise that their software "sucks less", not that it is "without suck".

This isn't an accusation. They explicitly mention this is as a design goal on their page. See the "Differences" section: https://dwm.suckless.org/

I always found the elitist statement on that page strangely at odds with the rest of the philosophy (at least how I understand it).

I mean, if everything is small and simple, doesn’t require you to learn a frameworkish configuration written in yet another language but can be configured with what amounts to a key/value file and can be installed in seconds with make + sudo make install, then it’s hardly elitist.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#82

Post by enriquto »

factorialboy wrote: post #34

Back in the day, I used to distro hop, window manager hop and try to find the ever eluding "perfect" setup. This lasted maybe 15 years. There was a sense of vanity in trying to be different yet spectacular. Today I would tell my younger self that use what makes you productive. Even if it is the standard Windows or Mac OS environments. R/unixporn is the nerds equivalent of shirtless beach dudes.

> R/unixporn is the nerds equivalent of shirtless beach dudes.

Wait, what kind of savage goes to the beach in a shirt?

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#83

Post by noobermin »

ilitirit wrote: post #72
tarruda wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the implementation POV, suckless software is very simple, and this makes it easier not only to tweak configuration (which is usually done C headers through defines), but also any kind of customization you might need. Take their window manager dwm as an example. The codebase is only 2000 lines long, so any bug you find will have to be hidden in those 2000 lines. If you take a Sunday afternoon to study the code, y…

> If you take a Sunday afternoon to study the code, you will very likely understand how every piece of the software works, at which point you will be in a position to fix anything you might find. You might even end up forking it and implementing your own window manager (AwesomeWM was originally forked from Dwm). I don't think I have ever needed to do this "fix" any piece of configuration in any software. While I unde…

Be a little charitable to OP and this reply. The configuration is indeed in code but it's macro defines. It's essentially as simple as changing a text configuration file, it's not like you have to actually edit code (as in new functions, adding actual logic). Things like fonts and sizes and colors is changing defines, it's actually simple.

Now when it comes to more complex stuff, like hotkeys, well you're essentially programming already in most other wms that doesn't have such things build in. AwesomeWM, i3, qtile (not popular but I used it for years) basically is half-way to programming, although it's a line, so it isn't any worse. I think the thing people aren't getting is the code is actually simple, so editing it and recompiling it isn't a chore.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#84

Post by t0astbread »

factorialboy wrote: post #34

Back in the day, I used to distro hop, window manager hop and try to find the ever eluding "perfect" setup. This lasted maybe 15 years. There was a sense of vanity in trying to be different yet spectacular. Today I would tell my younger self that use what makes you productive. Even if it is the standard Windows or Mac OS environments. R/unixporn is the nerds equivalent of shirtless beach dudes.

I agree, if you're trying to get something to be productive you should go with whatever gives you a good environment out of the box. But it sounds to me like 15 years ago (or whenever that was) you didn't really care about productivity but rather you just wanted to tinker with stuff for the sake of tinkering with stuff. And I think that's also valuable - there's a lot to be learned about how things work.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#85

Post by rlayton2 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #66

This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…

I've found the key is to just do small changes and let them build over time. For instance, I recently moved to i3, and it was hard to adjust at first, but now I'm used to it, I'm a bit more familiar to starting changing config to add my own buttons. That said, and like you, I'll be sticking to defaults as much as I can, but I deal with specific pain points when they come up, rather than do the whole thing up front.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#86

Post by boomboomsubban »

Certhas wrote: post #67
boomboomsubban wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Start with the name. That puts it in opposition immediately The name that immediately claims that their software sucks? I get where you are coming from, but you're just labeling the average software with a different term.

It very very clearly implies that other software sucks and theirs sucks less. If there would be any ambiguity in this they explicitly bash genetic "other hackers" all throughout their philosophy page. It's not exactly subtle.

And most other software implies their software is better than others. Why is calling it "less bad" somehow worse?

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#87

Post by necrotic_comp »

onli wrote: post #75
necrotic_comp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. I'd been struggling with using Xmonad et. al. on the desktop for years, figuring that there was something wrong with how I was doing it, hacking on the config to get it just right . Then the pandemic happened, and I had to work from home. So I went to ICEWM, have my terminal with Tmux in the center screen and my web browsers on my left and right monitors and that's good enough for me to be producti…

To be fair, IceWM is pretty cool. No, really. It's the center of my custom linux desktop. You can run a similar setup like described in the article with it, it replaces dwm just fine. Its preferences and winoptions are powerful enough.

oh! That's good to know. I just plopped it in there because I needed to get work done, and the start menu/desktop metaphor was enough to get me moving. I haven't even changed the defaults.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#88

Post by codr7 »

comocomolomo wrote: post #27

It looks like suckless tools work on X. I recently made the switch to Wayland and was wondering if a similar set of tools (with this minimalist philosophy) exist. Any idea?

Found a Wayland dwm port, still haven't gotten around to trying it out though.

https://github.com/djpohly/dwl

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#89

Post by Carpetsmoker »

tutfbhuf wrote: post #6
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

> 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.

I benchmarked my 600-line zsh config this morning because I was curious how long it takes to run. It takes about 0.02 seconds to run, and that's on a €250 crappy Celeron laptop.

Reading a simple config file will probably be faster. So yeah, it's pretty much negligible.

I do like the config.h as it's easy to include your own hacks, I added some key mappings and modifications to dwm that would be much harder with a config.ini or whatnot; but that's very different than startup speed.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#90

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

booleandilemma wrote: post #76
geerlingguy wrote: post #66

This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…

Yeah, the closer I can get to just opening Visual Studio and pressing F5 the happier I am. I like to focus on writing software and shipping a product, not troubleshooting toolchains and figuring out config files for each piece involved. I know not everyone feels this way.

I don't think it's about wanting to focus on troubleshooting toolchains or figuring out config files for each piece involved. I think the issue generally boils down to technical-minded users being empowered to unblock themselves.

I use tools like Linux and suckless because I am sick and tired of being blocked by shoddy software failing in an inexplicable, opaque way. If something goes wrong in Windows or Mac OS X, I might be able to file a bug off to into the void, and restart everything, to work around it. There's not much other choice. It's just a waste of time every time it happens.

With software I control, whether or not it's a waste of time is up to me.

Post reply on HN