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Part of the philosophy of the slightly odd suckless people is their projects are mostly configured by changing the source code and recompiling. This is I suppos

Part of the philosophy of the slightly odd suckless people is their projects are mostly configured by changing the source code and recompiling. This is I suppose a similar approach in a modern open source vein. Although their general asceticism makes their projects a bit of an acquired taste I suspect.

analog_daddy 5mo ago
Ohh acquired taste it is.. I had two stints with suckless software. First, when i was in early twenties when I had a lot of time in the world, and thought the manliest way to talk to a machine is all through low level C code. Had a whole flow to patch it and heck the code is so well written and commented, i was able to understand it. Then, i guess life happened and i discovered more interesting stuff to spend time on. And now in my late twenties, suckless terminal is the only one that would work reliably on a shitty old enterprise linux system at work. Yeah, we got xterm and konsole (the older one). I am seeing them in a whole different light now. I did not read the source code now and it is effectively a foreign language to me, but just being able to have modern features in it without too many dependencies is a different level of bliss. This time, I am glad I have the flexi patch to the rescue since, i passed on suckless terminal as a real alternative since I don’t want to patch it manually or solve merge conflicts! Even though I don’t like the elitist attitude of the project, can’t deny they got a point. Why does a terminal emulator need to be so complicated! https://github.com/bakkeby/st-flexipatch https://github.com/bakkeby/st-flexipatch
- archargelod 5mo ago
  > I don’t want to patch it manually or solve merge conflicts I wonder, is this really such a big problem? How often do people add patches or change their config? I've configured my st once and haven't touched that build for years. I use only few patches like scrollback, custom colortheme and a "plumb" for few scripts. I've also had an opportunity recently, to try a "modern" and trendy terminal and I can't see myself switching to something slower (in terms of lag) and using 10x more memory and cpu even when idle for literally zero gain.
  - analog_daddy 5mo ago
    Not frequently, however in experimental phase where you need to debug if any specific combination of patch is causing issues, it helps a lot. For instance, I had issues with my delete key not working even with delkey patch and then after trying to enable patches incrementally I zeroed in on the fixkeyboardinput patch. Sure I can do this in a VCS flow but, it feels magical what a bunch of ifdef’s simplify the process to. And I feel it is still suckless philosophy since the code still compiles to exactly what you need. Additionally, it helps lower the barrier to entry for a lot of people, who would have shied away from the manual patching flow. You’d be surprised how often i have seen people squint with default xterm on our servers, not knowing how to configure it and messing around with xrdb. (Which takes a while to propagate across LSF clusters). With flexipatch it feels easier to introduce it to them since I just say run make after any config changes to apply the setting and restart the terminal emulator. Ohh i tried wezterm and ghostty. Couldn’t get them working using just software rendering. And once st worked, I realized I don’t need it tbh.
nagaiaida 5mo ago
the general asceticism, frign (on the board of suckless.org e.v.) setting his mailserver hostname to a nazi bunker, them picking a torch march through the german countryside as a bonding activity instead of literally anything else... yeah. at that point why would one want to bother trying to acquire the taste?

analog_daddy 5mo ago

Ohh acquired taste it is.. I had two stints with suckless software. First, when i was in early twenties when I had a lot of time in the world, and thought the manliest way to talk to a machine is all through low level C code. Had a whole flow to patch it and heck the code is so well written and commented, i was able to understand it. Then, i guess life happened and i discovered more interesting stuff to spend time on. And now in my late twenties, suckless terminal is the only one that would work reliably on a shitty old enterprise linux system at work. Yeah, we got xterm and konsole (the older one). I am seeing them in a whole different light now. I did not read the source code now and it is effectively a foreign language to me, but just being able to have modern features in it without too many dependencies is a different level of bliss. This time, I am glad I have the flexi patch to the rescue since, i passed on suckless terminal as a real alternative since I don’t want to patch it manually or solve merge conflicts! Even though I don’t like the elitist attitude of the project, can’t deny they got a point. Why does a terminal emulator need to be so complicated! https://github.com/bakkeby/st-flexipatch https://github.com/bakkeby/st-flexipatch

archargelod 5mo ago
> I don’t want to patch it manually or solve merge conflicts I wonder, is this really such a big problem? How often do people add patches or change their config? I've configured my st once and haven't touched that build for years. I use only few patches like scrollback, custom colortheme and a "plumb" for few scripts. I've also had an opportunity recently, to try a "modern" and trendy terminal and I can't see myself switching to something slower (in terms of lag) and using 10x more memory and cpu even when idle for literally zero gain.
- analog_daddy 5mo ago
  Not frequently, however in experimental phase where you need to debug if any specific combination of patch is causing issues, it helps a lot. For instance, I had issues with my delete key not working even with delkey patch and then after trying to enable patches incrementally I zeroed in on the fixkeyboardinput patch. Sure I can do this in a VCS flow but, it feels magical what a bunch of ifdef’s simplify the process to. And I feel it is still suckless philosophy since the code still compiles to exactly what you need. Additionally, it helps lower the barrier to entry for a lot of people, who would have shied away from the manual patching flow. You’d be surprised how often i have seen people squint with default xterm on our servers, not knowing how to configure it and messing around with xrdb. (Which takes a while to propagate across LSF clusters). With flexipatch it feels easier to introduce it to them since I just say run make after any config changes to apply the setting and restart the terminal emulator. Ohh i tried wezterm and ghostty. Couldn’t get them working using just software rendering. And once st worked, I realized I don’t need it tbh.

nagaiaida 5mo ago

the general asceticism, frign (on the board of suckless.org e.v.) setting his mailserver hostname to a nazi bunker, them picking a torch march through the german countryside as a bonding activity instead of literally anything else... yeah. at that point why would one want to bother trying to acquire the taste?