11 ms·
St: Simple terminal implementation for X
- det23x 14y agoThat's definitly the right direction. Our software stack is getting too complicated, and is carrying so much stuff that is almost never used (e.g. obscure entries in terminfo's db). But of course, real world does not give us much time to rethink/refactor our computing structures.
- boboblong 14y agoMaybe people will start to refactor the worst offenders. It takes more than a slight improvement to displace software that's widely used, but I'm sure there are things that we use that could be an order of magnitude better (according to some metric). Gmail was able to win converts because it was an order of magnitude better than the competition.
- kelnos 14y agofonts (you can use xfontsel(1) to generate a valid XLFD) No no no no no. Stop using core X fonts. Just... stop. If this is supposed to be a "modern" replacement, it should be using fontconfig and client-side fonts with an appropriate renderer.
- slurry 14y agoI don't believe the suckless team is working with the same definition of "modern" as you might be.
- jlgreco 14y agoThat's really not the Suckless way. It is hard to really describe in a nutshell, you should just check out their philosophy page: http://suckless.org/philosophy http://suckless.org/philosophy I guess the best way to describe it is they are along similar lines as the 'cat -v' folks.
- kelnos 14y agoI get that using client-side fonts adds dependencies and complexity, but XLFDs are not "simple"... for the user, anyway. I dunno. The Suckless guys may feel that simplicity of implementation is king; I believe that simplicity for the user is more important. Each to their own.
- enduser 14y agoSome of us prefer bitmapped fonts, even on high-resolution displays, and software with fewer dependencies. There are some nice high-resolution bitmap console fonts in the standard X font collection, and others (Terminus, Proggy) are readily available.
- dysoco 14y agoI'm a big fan of Suckless software, check out Sandy too: http://tools.suckless.org/sandy http://tools.suckless.org/sandy
- javert 14y agoWhy do you use Sandy? I use dwm and I'm also a big fan of suckless, but I've never heard of Sandy before, and I'm genuinely curious why this would be preferable over vi or emacs (depending on which camp you're in).
- demetrius 14y agoBecause vi and emacs are just too complex and do things that should be done by separate programs, like formatting?
- dysoco 14y agoExactly: I tried learning both Emacs and Vi/Vim and it's just too complex, I have better things to do at the moment: I just want a simple text editor that works in CLI. Joe is a similar text editor.
- _feda_ 14y agovim, too complex? you could say that about practically any CLI interface but it's merely a relatively steep learning curve, not a case of too much complexity. In fact vim is pretty concise and compact in terms of design
- demetrius 14y agovim comes with a built-in program language vimscript and its very own spellchecker. If vim is not complex, than what is? I could argue that nvi may be not too complex, but vim is certainly too complex. (An good example of an editor that is not too complex but works well with external tools is Acme.)
- klrr 14y agoJust to give you an impression of how small it is, xterm 64K LOC rxvt 32K LOC st 3K LOC (these numbers ain't precise)
- guilloche 14y agoAmazing and I am also a fan of suckless.org. I am using dwm, dmenu, sic and st now. The binary size of st, rxvt and xterm are 184k, 2.7M and 640k (on x86_64 arch, not accurate). What's wrong with rxvt's binary size? st's binary size is not so small compared to its LOC.
- vidarh 14y agoPerhaps your rxvt is statically linked? Mine is 104K (Ubuntu 12.04, x86_64) vs. 424K for xterm.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago* Not including the Haskell runtime.
- klrr 14y agoThe suckless community are die hard fans of the good old UNIX and C. They only release projects written in C and RC(a bourne shell clone ported from plan9).
- micampe 14y agoHaskell? I doubt the Suckless guys are using Haskell. http://git.suckless.org/st/tree/st.c http://git.suckless.org/st/tree/st.c
- derleth 14y ago> * Not including the Haskell runtime. Where did you get the impression Haskell was involved in any way here?
- drbig 14y agoDoes it support transparency/tint for background? (Yes, I know, but it's not '97 and I would actually like to have the thing I'm constantly looking at a bit more visually appealing.)
- dhimes 14y agoIt's not just aesthetics. I often work on a cramped screen and being able to see just-so-slightly through the terminal is a big help.
- icebraining 14y agohttp://lists.suckless.org/dev/1009/6046.html http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1009/6046.html Don't let uriel read your request, though ;)
- packetslave 14y agoI imagine that would be unlikely. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4654125 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4654125
- icebraining 14y agoOh. Crap, that's a shame, I had no idea. Thanks.
- burntsushi 14y agoWhy not run `xcompmgr` and set the transparency with `transset-df`?
- kaolinite 14y agoIf you resize the window, does outputted text scroll (like OSX's terminal) or does it stay where it was (like xterm)? This is a feature I've been after for a while on Linux but have been unable to find a terminal that supports it.
- dimitar 14y agognome-terminal does it and probably the others based on the VTE widget also do.
- hcal 14y agoI just built and tested it on Mountain Lion. The text stays put and leaves the newly created space empty, just like xterm. I think the point st is that it is small enough to be hackable , so it might not be too difficult to add the feature. On a separate note; I'm not sure why, but xterm actually launches faster than st, although both are so fast it doesn't matter.
- mitchty 14y agoUnicode rxvt reflows text too. Only other terminal that does outside of the osx terminals.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jlgreco 14y agoScreen used in xterm (or any other terminal emulator that normally does not reflow) will reflow (though tmux never will).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- adimitrov 14y agoThis is an awesome terminal, and I think I'll just switch to it from urxvt. Don't be deceived by its light-weightedness. It has very sensible features, it seems. Including full xft (anti-aliased fonts) and unicode support, and shortcuts to: zoom in, zoom out, and paste from clipboard. Typically, only very heavy-weight terminals (like gnome-terminal) would support these things. I'm charmed. Great stuff.
- _feda_ 14y agoTry surf from suckless for single-page, distraction free browsing. That and practically any other of the suckless tools; the standard of both design and execution with suckless is just out of this world, and when they say in their mission statement that they intend to comply with the unix philosophy they really do hold up to it with their code.
- stevenrace 14y agoAs an ardent DWM/dmenu user, I'm ashamed I didn't know about this earlier. To fellow ArchLinux users, it's worth noting the AUR package is broken. I have uploaded a working PKGBUILD here: https://gist.github.com/4417214 https://gist.github.com/4417214