5 ms·

The drama around this community is silly. I use these tools because I absolutely love their philosophy on software, and software alone. I couldn't care less wha

by imiric 2y ago

The drama around this community is silly. I use these tools because I absolutely love their philosophy on software, and software alone. I couldn't care less what the authors personal beliefs and political leanings are, or who they offended on IRC or social media. I recently spent a few hours evaluating different terminals. I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways. Most annoying of all is that I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to spend days of my life digging into their source code to make the changes I want, nor spend time pestering the maintainers to make the changes for me. So I ended back at my st fork I've been using for years, which sucks... less. :) It consists of... 4,765 SLOC, of which I only understand a few hundred, but that's enough for my needs. I haven't touched the code in nearly 5 years, and the binary is that old too. I hope it compiles today, but I'm not too worried if it doesn't. This program has been stable and bug-free AFAICT for that long. I can't say that about any other program I use on a daily basis. Hhmm I suppose the GNU coreutils can be included there as well. But they also share a similar Unixy philosophy. So, is this philosophy perfect? Far from it. But it certainly comes closer than any other approach at building reliable software. I've found that keeping complexity at bay is the most difficult, yet most crucial thing.[1] [1]: https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-complexity https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-complexity

9283409232 2y ago
Whenever suckless comes up, I see more people saying "the drama is silly" than I do actual drama. I don't even know what drama people are talking about.
- imiric 2y ago
  I'm not sure how you missed it, since it comes up in practically every Suckless-related thread[1], including this one. The drama is mostly in social media and IRC circles, though it tends to spill over here as well. [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22suckless%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- indrora 2y ago
  Short form: * One of the lead devs' laptops is named after Hitler's hideout in the forest * Their 2017 conference had a torchwalk that was a staple of Nazi youth camping (and heavily encouraged by the SS as a nationalism thing) * Multiple of the core devs are just assholes to people on and offline. * Most of the suckless philosophy is "It does barely what it needs to and it was built by us, so it's superior to what anyone else has written". A lot of it shows in dwm, dmenu, etc.
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    In order to write highly opinionated software you have to be some kind of an asshole, otherwise other people wear you down with their own opinions.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      It's one thing to be an asshole, it's quite another to subscribe to Nazi ideology. Linus Torvalds, for example, used to be a raging asshole, but as far as I know he was just a dick to other people who had pissed him off. He wasn't advocating for genocide or stripping rights away from people or whatever. This FRIGN guy seems like he might be a part of the latter group. If true, that makes him a very different kind of asshole, the kind we do not welcome into our communities.
  - ivirshup 2y ago
    Not defending them, the Hitler laptop thing seems bad, but within Germany torchwalks are pretty normal and not Nazi associated. For example, there was one as part of a ceremony honoring Merkel as she left office.
    - hobofan 2y ago
      There is a difference between a independently organized torchwalk, which especially after Charlottesville internationally gained popularity in far-right circles, and a "Zapfenstrich", a military honor granted to high ranking military/political leaders, which is tradition when the German chancelor/president leaves office. Yes, there are definitely also normal torchwalks in Germany (I have been part of some as part of church youthgroups). However with all the other information that has surfaced about suckless over the years, it really doesn't look like a coincidence that they choose that as a group activity on their get together over all other possible things you could be doing.
azthecx 2y ago
It also makes for very "efficient" software, the amount of time Sent has saved me, with very minor styling modifications, makes it one of the best software I've ever used.
Barrin92 2y ago
> I'm not going to spend days of my life digging into their source code to make the changes I want This is an odd thing to bring up though because that's quite literally the only way to make any changes to suckless software, editing source code in C. The entire philosophy behind is entirely performative in many ways. There's nothing simple or "unbloated" about having to recompile a piece of software every time you want to make what should really be a runtime user configuration, and it makes an entire compiler toolchain effectively a dependency for even the most trivial config change. I tried their window manager out once and the only way to add some functionality through plugins is to apply source code patches, but there's no guarantee that the order doesn't mess things up, so you basically end up manually stitching pieces of code together for functionality that is virtually unrelated. It's actual madness from a complexity standpoint.
- imiric 2y ago
  > This is an odd thing to bring up though because that's quite literally the only way to make any changes to suckless software, editing source code in C. You're ignoring the part where the tools are often a fraction of the size and complexity of similar tools. I can go through a 5K SLOC program and understand it relatively quickly, even if I'm unfamiliar with the programming language or APIs. I can't do the same for programs 10 or 100x that size. The code is also well structured and documented IME, so changing it is not that difficult. In practice, once you configure the program to your liking, you rarely have to recompile it again. Like I said, I'm using a 5 year old st binary that still works exactly how I want it to. Maintaining a set of patches is usually not a major problem either. The patches are often small, and conflicts are rare, but easily fixable. Again, in my experience, which will likely be different from yours. Our requirements for how we want the software to work will naturally be different. The madness you describe to me sounds like a feature. It intentionally makes it difficult to add a bunch of functionality to the software, which is also what keeps it simple.
  - Avshalom 2y ago
    >I can go through a 5K SLOC program and understand it relatively quickly you already said in your first post that you can't understand it.
flubbergusto 2y ago
> I recently spent a few hours evaluating different terminals. I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways Last time I did the same (days not hours tho lol) was somewhat surprised to find myself landing on xterm. After resolving a couple of gotchas (reliable font-resizing is somewhat esoteric; neovim needs `XTERM=''`; check your TERM) I have been very pleased and not looked back. urxvt is OG but xterm sixel support is nice.
klaussilveira 2y ago
> I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways. After moving to a gigantic monitor and gigantic resolutions, my poor st fork was suffering. zutty was a great replacement for me: https://git.hq.sig7.se/zutty.git https://git.hq.sig7.se/zutty.git
- imiric 2y ago
  Ah, interesting. Thanks for sharing!
zzo38computer 2y ago
> I couldn't care less what the authors personal beliefs and political leanings are, or who they offended on IRC or social media. I agree. Such things are not relevant when considering to use their formats and programs and stuff like that. What is relevant is their software and related stuff like that, and not their political leanings, etc. I do not agree with all of their ideas about computer software, although I agree with some of them. Like them, I also don't like systemd, so I agree with them about not liking systemd. I do use farbfeld, although I wrote all of the software for doing so by myself rather than using their software (although it should be interoperable with their software, and any other software that supports farbfeld (such as ImageMagick)). Also, I do not use farbfeld for disk files, but only with pipes. (My farbfeld utilities package also includes the only XPM encoder/decoder that I know of that supports some of the uncommon features, that most XPM encoders/decoders I know of are not compatible with or are not fully capable of.) I may consider libzahl if I have a use for big integers, although I also might not need it. (I had written some dealing with big integers before; one program I wrote (asn1.c) that deals with big integers only converts between base 100 and base 128 in order to convert OIDs between text and binary format.) However, I would also want software that can better handle non-Unicode text (so, it is one things I try to write), which many programs don't do properly. This should mean that any code that deals with Unicode (if any) is bypassed when non-Unicode is used. Some programs should not need to support Unicode at all (including some that should not need to care about character encoding at all, or that do not deal with text, etc). (I had considered writing my own terminal emulator for this and other reasons.)
Philpax 2y ago
> I couldn't care less what the authors personal beliefs and political leanings are, or who they offended on IRC or social media. I just don't really want to use or support software by people who, at best, think it's appropriate to joke about an ideology that wants me [0] dead, or at worst, actively subscribe to that ideology. There are some things that I'm not willing to look past. [0]: non-white, non-straight, left of the political spectrum
- econ 2y ago
  Then, when people are no longer allowed to talk about what (stupid shit) they believe and jokes should only be made behinds peoples back. Who should be on the committee that decides what we may talk and joke about and how should the committee inform it self? The new forbidden topics will be chosen from the set of topics people talk about which get smaller, stranger and more political. What people secretly believe will be much closer to the secret dialog while the public dialog floats away. That people are saying things is the least of your concern. Fascinating perspective tho. It is much easier if one is more secure, talks easy or has a more mundane world view. Not someone one can choose. Thicker skin however. Also interesting, if one didn't like the people running the lunchroom at the end of the street or didn't like the visitors you use to be able to go to some other place. Today they are all part of the same chain. We've lost a lot of freedom there.
- lionkor 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - stonogo 2y ago
    Why not?
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      Because fixating on politics is bad for one's own mental health, and toxic for the community. It turns everything into a flame war about politics and divides, rather than unites, people. It suffocates interesting and worthwhile discussions. And on top of that, it doesn't even accomplish anything good to make those downsides worth it.
opan 2y ago
I would highly recommend the "foot" terminal if you are on Wayland and can use it. I used urxvt, termite, and briefly alacritty in the past.
- Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
  I use foot and with a catpucchin theme , oh it's so nice and cozy. I use pure zsh with some plugins manually installed , the luke smith dot files, and the history part sometimes take a lot to load but foot is just fast
tasuki 2y ago
> spent a few hours evaluating different terminals. I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways. If you don't mind, tell more? I use kitty and it seems a big upgrade from whatever I used before...

by imiric 2y ago

9283409232 2y ago

Whenever suckless comes up, I see more people saying "the drama is silly" than I do actual drama. I don't even know what drama people are talking about.

imiric 2y ago
I'm not sure how you missed it, since it comes up in practically every Suckless-related thread[1], including this one. The drama is mostly in social media and IRC circles, though it tends to spill over here as well. [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22suckless%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
indrora 2y ago
Short form: * One of the lead devs' laptops is named after Hitler's hideout in the forest * Their 2017 conference had a torchwalk that was a staple of Nazi youth camping (and heavily encouraged by the SS as a nationalism thing) * Multiple of the core devs are just assholes to people on and offline. * Most of the suckless philosophy is "It does barely what it needs to and it was built by us, so it's superior to what anyone else has written". A lot of it shows in dwm, dmenu, etc.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  In order to write highly opinionated software you have to be some kind of an asshole, otherwise other people wear you down with their own opinions.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    It's one thing to be an asshole, it's quite another to subscribe to Nazi ideology. Linus Torvalds, for example, used to be a raging asshole, but as far as I know he was just a dick to other people who had pissed him off. He wasn't advocating for genocide or stripping rights away from people or whatever. This FRIGN guy seems like he might be a part of the latter group. If true, that makes him a very different kind of asshole, the kind we do not welcome into our communities.
- ivirshup 2y ago
  Not defending them, the Hitler laptop thing seems bad, but within Germany torchwalks are pretty normal and not Nazi associated. For example, there was one as part of a ceremony honoring Merkel as she left office.
  - hobofan 2y ago
    There is a difference between a independently organized torchwalk, which especially after Charlottesville internationally gained popularity in far-right circles, and a "Zapfenstrich", a military honor granted to high ranking military/political leaders, which is tradition when the German chancelor/president leaves office. Yes, there are definitely also normal torchwalks in Germany (I have been part of some as part of church youthgroups). However with all the other information that has surfaced about suckless over the years, it really doesn't look like a coincidence that they choose that as a group activity on their get together over all other possible things you could be doing.

azthecx 2y ago

It also makes for very "efficient" software, the amount of time Sent has saved me, with very minor styling modifications, makes it one of the best software I've ever used.

Barrin92 2y ago

> I'm not going to spend days of my life digging into their source code to make the changes I want This is an odd thing to bring up though because that's quite literally the only way to make any changes to suckless software, editing source code in C. The entire philosophy behind is entirely performative in many ways. There's nothing simple or "unbloated" about having to recompile a piece of software every time you want to make what should really be a runtime user configuration, and it makes an entire compiler toolchain effectively a dependency for even the most trivial config change. I tried their window manager out once and the only way to add some functionality through plugins is to apply source code patches, but there's no guarantee that the order doesn't mess things up, so you basically end up manually stitching pieces of code together for functionality that is virtually unrelated. It's actual madness from a complexity standpoint.

imiric 2y ago
> This is an odd thing to bring up though because that's quite literally the only way to make any changes to suckless software, editing source code in C. You're ignoring the part where the tools are often a fraction of the size and complexity of similar tools. I can go through a 5K SLOC program and understand it relatively quickly, even if I'm unfamiliar with the programming language or APIs. I can't do the same for programs 10 or 100x that size. The code is also well structured and documented IME, so changing it is not that difficult. In practice, once you configure the program to your liking, you rarely have to recompile it again. Like I said, I'm using a 5 year old st binary that still works exactly how I want it to. Maintaining a set of patches is usually not a major problem either. The patches are often small, and conflicts are rare, but easily fixable. Again, in my experience, which will likely be different from yours. Our requirements for how we want the software to work will naturally be different. The madness you describe to me sounds like a feature. It intentionally makes it difficult to add a bunch of functionality to the software, which is also what keeps it simple.
- Avshalom 2y ago
  >I can go through a 5K SLOC program and understand it relatively quickly you already said in your first post that you can't understand it.

flubbergusto 2y ago

> I recently spent a few hours evaluating different terminals. I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways Last time I did the same (days not hours tho lol) was somewhat surprised to find myself landing on xterm. After resolving a couple of gotchas (reliable font-resizing is somewhat esoteric; neovim needs `XTERM=''`; check your TERM) I have been very pleased and not looked back. urxvt is OG but xterm sixel support is nice.

klaussilveira 2y ago

> I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways. After moving to a gigantic monitor and gigantic resolutions, my poor st fork was suffering. zutty was a great replacement for me: https://git.hq.sig7.se/zutty.git https://git.hq.sig7.se/zutty.git

imiric 2y ago
Ah, interesting. Thanks for sharing!

zzo38computer 2y ago

> I couldn't care less what the authors personal beliefs and political leanings are, or who they offended on IRC or social media. I agree. Such things are not relevant when considering to use their formats and programs and stuff like that. What is relevant is their software and related stuff like that, and not their political leanings, etc. I do not agree with all of their ideas about computer software, although I agree with some of them. Like them, I also don't like systemd, so I agree with them about not liking systemd. I do use farbfeld, although I wrote all of the software for doing so by myself rather than using their software (although it should be interoperable with their software, and any other software that supports farbfeld (such as ImageMagick)). Also, I do not use farbfeld for disk files, but only with pipes. (My farbfeld utilities package also includes the only XPM encoder/decoder that I know of that supports some of the uncommon features, that most XPM encoders/decoders I know of are not compatible with or are not fully capable of.) I may consider libzahl if I have a use for big integers, although I also might not need it. (I had written some dealing with big integers before; one program I wrote (asn1.c) that deals with big integers only converts between base 100 and base 128 in order to convert OIDs between text and binary format.) However, I would also want software that can better handle non-Unicode text (so, it is one things I try to write), which many programs don't do properly. This should mean that any code that deals with Unicode (if any) is bypassed when non-Unicode is used. Some programs should not need to support Unicode at all (including some that should not need to care about character encoding at all, or that do not deal with text, etc). (I had considered writing my own terminal emulator for this and other reasons.)

Philpax 2y ago

> I couldn't care less what the authors personal beliefs and political leanings are, or who they offended on IRC or social media. I just don't really want to use or support software by people who, at best, think it's appropriate to joke about an ideology that wants me [0] dead, or at worst, actively subscribe to that ideology. There are some things that I'm not willing to look past. [0]: non-white, non-straight, left of the political spectrum

econ 2y ago
Then, when people are no longer allowed to talk about what (stupid shit) they believe and jokes should only be made behinds peoples back. Who should be on the committee that decides what we may talk and joke about and how should the committee inform it self? The new forbidden topics will be chosen from the set of topics people talk about which get smaller, stranger and more political. What people secretly believe will be much closer to the secret dialog while the public dialog floats away. That people are saying things is the least of your concern. Fascinating perspective tho. It is much easier if one is more secure, talks easy or has a more mundane world view. Not someone one can choose. Thicker skin however. Also interesting, if one didn't like the people running the lunchroom at the end of the street or didn't like the visitors you use to be able to go to some other place. Today they are all part of the same chain. We've lost a lot of freedom there.
lionkor 2y ago
[flagged]
- stonogo 2y ago
  Why not?
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    Because fixating on politics is bad for one's own mental health, and toxic for the community. It turns everything into a flame war about politics and divides, rather than unites, people. It suffocates interesting and worthwhile discussions. And on top of that, it doesn't even accomplish anything good to make those downsides worth it.

opan 2y ago

I would highly recommend the "foot" terminal if you are on Wayland and can use it. I used urxvt, termite, and briefly alacritty in the past.

Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
I use foot and with a catpucchin theme , oh it's so nice and cozy. I use pure zsh with some plugins manually installed , the luke smith dot files, and the history part sometimes take a lot to load but foot is just fast

tasuki 2y ago

> spent a few hours evaluating different terminals. I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways. If you don't mind, tell more? I use kitty and it seems a big upgrade from whatever I used before...