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Why I Use Suckless Tools

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Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#121

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#122

Post by toohotatopic »

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,…

There is another dimension to it besides optimizing existing workflows. These tools are so small that you can not only tweak them but also reassemble the concepts into new tools for new workflows. Tweaking those tools is just the first step towards mastering them.

It's like knowing compilers. You don't use that knowlege to tweak c++. You use it to build your own special language when needed.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#123

Post by carapace »

noobermin wrote: post #68

The thing I like about the suckless people and their tools is not breaking what works. Seriously, the primary problem with software today in my assessment is churn. Things change way too fast and you wonder how people get anything done as aging things are constantly being deprecated instead of being considered stabilized. I'm not really a developer (I'm a computational scientist, so I am a different kind of developer…

> Seriously, the primary problem with software today in my assessment is churn.

I agree. The machines are wicked fast, most of the needful algorithms are already sussed out, not to mention how ML solves another swath of problems. Today most "programming" should consist of picking and configuring existing software, and this should be seen as a big win and a sign of maturity.

(Instead we have Python 3 and Rust and... )

So, yes, we need the outside view, please complain!

In re: elitism and hostility, remember that most of the old-school programmers are old enough to have grown up before nerds became cool, so some of that grows out of resentment and alienation.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#124

Post by saithound »

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 too like to focus on developing my software and doing my research, and am not interested in troubleshooting toolchains, tracking down config files, or messing around with computers in any way unrelated to my work.

And that's exactly why I like dwm so much: it has zero dependencies, and no config files. It just displays the windows of the programs that I actually want to use, and gets out of my way.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#125

Post by profsnuggles »

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,…

Yesterday I posted something about an emacs keybinding and someone pointed out that the command actually doesn't have a default keybinding. I set up that keybinding sometime in the mid 2000's and it hasn't changed since then. Since 2005 home many times have the defaults change in Windows/OSX/Gnome/KDE? (A lot! Gnome3, Plasma, Windows 8)

It's something you do once and then leave alone. If someone is tweaking their configuration all the time it's because they enjoy it. Changing a few settings doesn't doom you to a life of debugging and compiling.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#126

Post by greenshackle2 »

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…

Personally, it's a hugely productive use of my time, if I didn't have the ability to customize my UIs to work around my health issues I could code very little, or not at all.

I use Awesome WM which is configured / scripted with lua. I know lua already so it's great.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#127

Post by baxrob »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #86
Certhas wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Oh no, you said the secret words! https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#128

Post by ken »

> Their window manager dwm is just a window manager. It doesn’t handle things like transparency, compositing or volume control.

That is a strange division of labor. I thought transparency and composition were aspects of window management. What else would they be?

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#129

Post by clarry »

arkitaip wrote: post #80
dilandau wrote: post #65

Suckless is all about hacking your own tools. Totally unsurprising that "hacker" "news" doesn't get it. https://suckless.org/hacking/

Most of us have been there, done that since childhood. Once you reach a certain age, it's more important to get things done and not fuss over trivialities in life.

Counter point: as I get older, I find it harder and harder to put up with annoying little nags in the software I use (iow, I have less patience for crap). And boy does software today have a ton of that. I think I'm just about to cross the point where I'll dump the default gnome setup on my work laptop (ubuntu) and install dwm or cwm or whatever. Even with all the tweaking and customization, it doesn't take that long, but it makes work more comfortable every hour, every day, for years to come.

It's like ergonomics. When you're a kid, you sit on what you have and you've got more interesting things to worry about than the height of your desk? At some point in life you might just want a nice chair and roomy adjustable desk with a sizeable external monitor on a proper adjustable stand to make work comfortable. That's why you hack your window manager or shell or whatever. The defaults are always terrible and not tailored for you.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#130

Post by ken »

ryanmjacobs wrote: post #45
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…

This comment strikes home. The "bug-space" is so much smaller, and definitely possible for a lone newcomer to grasp in a day or two

A window manager may be only 2000 lines of source code but it implements a host of formal and informal standards and interacts with hundreds of other programs on my computer.

You may need only a day or two to orient yourself to the source code, but that’s on top of months or years of experience with X11R6 and ICCCMv2 and EWMH and such. How much debugging did you first need to do to discover your current issue was even in dwm?

EDIT: I especially love the phrasing in Wikipedia's ICCCM article: dwm "can be configured for compliance". If 'configuration' can include editing source code, I'm sure that's true!

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