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I like suckless. I use some of their tools within my Awesome(WM) sessions. However, I don't see the point of St. There are dozens of other graphical terminal e

I like suckless. I use some of their tools within my Awesome(WM) sessions. However, I don't see the point of St. There are dozens of other graphical terminal emulators that were created with the exact same goal: "Xterm's codebase sucks, we can do better". FWIW, I've (currently[1]) settled on ROXTerm, which (on Debian and Ubuntu) comes in GTK2 and GTK3 variants. I use Tmux within it. It does FreeType and FontConfig fonts well, which I care strongly about. Its colour scheme is configurable and it's not tied to a desktop environment. It does use libvte from Gnome to implement the terminal emulator widget, and I'm OK with that. Less NIH please! [1] After using Gnome-Terminal, Konsole, and RXVT-Unicode for a while. I doubt my quest has yet ended.

e12e 12y ago
I've been using a few - in the end I landed on sakura: http://www.pleyades.net/david/projects/sakura http://www.pleyades.net/david/projects/sakura I don't quite remember why I ended up moving from urxvt to sakura (and not eg: roxterm) -- but I think it was a combination of it being light (enough), easy to set up without any kind of window decorations, as well as a sane way to pick and choose fonts. With the current gtk ~/.conf-scheme it has a nice ini-like config file, and I can easily have different font preferences on my laptop, my netbook and my desktop (all different screen sizes and different PPI). FFW I use a spartan xmonad setup, and typically run one, or a handful of terminal windows, each with their own gnu screen instance (typically one local, and a few remote screen instances over ssh. Sometimes I'll have more than one view/windows to one screen session -- and sometimes I might have a screen for a chroot or local vm/container of some sort).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- emilburzo 12y ago
  Thanks for letting me know about sakura, I think it's the first one to actually match the rendering speed of xterm. I do have one question though, why are the colors more pale in sakura than in xterm? And is there any way to change it?
  - tenfingers 12y ago
    I have no idea about sakura, but being a libvte-based terminal, I highly doubt it's comparable (or even approaches) xterm in term of rendering speed. I'm wondering how people can compare these terminals mentioning speed, considering the actual performance is bound by libvte, and thus will be equally the same between roxterm, sakura, tilda, etc. What are they measuring? xterm is quite fast (in the order of 3-5x faster) than any libvte-based terminal. Try doing something like "time [term] -c 'cat <bigfile>'", and try varying the scrollback size to have a real measure. [u]rxvt in turn is even faster, especially with large scrollback buffers, which is the main (I could say only, really) reason I use it. As in, 10x faster than any libvte based terminal. I also use suckless tools (with spectrwm), though I never had a reason to investigate st. urxvt supports fallback fonts, which for UTF-8 text is essential.
    - emilburzo 12y ago
      > I'm wondering how people can compare these terminals mentioning speed, considering the actual performance is bound by libvte, and thus will be equally the same between roxterm, sakura, tilda, etc. What are they measuring? Not sure about others, but the first thing I test: dmesg; ps auxww; ls /dev I only really care about apparent speed and, like I said, sakura was the only one that was comparable to xterm. None of the other terminals I have tried (and only now I realize that they have libvte in common, thanks for that) have managed to perform acceptably (for me, at least).
  - e12e 12y ago
    On my windoze box now, so can't check - but I think there should be something about colors in the right-click context menu? But I'm not entirely sure when (as in which version) palette/colorset support[1] was added -- it might not yet be in Debian stable? https://code.launchpad.net/~kraiskil/sakura/colorsets/+merge/167467 https://code.launchpad.net/~kraiskil/sakura/colorsets/+merge...
    - emilburzo 12y ago
      Awesome, thank you! If others have the same issue, it's: right click -> Options -> More -> Set Palette -> Xterm
lsiebert 12y ago
I like roxterm, but I recently switched to xfce's terminal, which lets me load it without a menu bar, (I like having more vertical space). More options are good.
- lamby 12y ago
  hide_menubar=1 in roxterm config :)
  - lsiebert 12y ago
    Sorry that was unclear, I meant no menu bar and no drag bar with minimize and close buttons; my terminal window goes from the top of my screen to the bottom. I realize I can use a DE that lets me do that, but my preferred DE on linux atm is xfce itself. If there is a way to configure roxterm to not have a drag bar from inside the program, I have not found it.
1_player 12y ago
I've used gnome-terminal, sakura and now I'm using terminator: http://gnometerminator.blogspot.co.uk/p/introduction.html http://gnometerminator.blogspot.co.uk/p/introduction.html The main difference with the other terminal emulators is that I can easily do horizontal and vertical window splits. Many use screen or tmux for that but I find them too limiting, especially in their scrollback implementation.
- staz 12y ago
  Gnome-terminal, rox-term, sakura and terminator are actually all based on the same terminal emulation backend: libvte
- gcb0 12y ago
  i always found screen splitting in the terminal when you have a graphical window manager kinda of silly.
  - kragniz 12y ago
    It means you can do screen splitting on a remote machine and still have the same workflow as your local sessions, which is pretty nice.
  - glandium 12y ago
    I'd love it if there would be graphical frontend to tmux or screen. Something that would look very much like a terminal emulator, with tabs and splits, but backed by screen or tmux, whereby each tab or split window would be a tmux or screen window. And the awesome part is that when you're elsewhere, you could ssh in and attach to that tmux or screen session.
    - lmz 12y ago
      You can do that on OS X with iTerm2 e.g.: http://www.railsonmaui.com/blog/2014/03/11/rocking-with-tmux-tmuxinator-and-iterm2-for-rails-development/ http://www.railsonmaui.com/blog/2014/03/11/rocking-with-tmux...
    - 12y ago
middleclick 12y ago
I use the Xfce 4 Terminal on a i3 with no DE. Works wonderfully and has all the features I care for and need.
- systems_glitch 12y ago
  Same here. Very few dependencies.
gcb0 12y ago
st is not about rewriting xterm. it's about removing features, and then rewriting. for example, it doesn't even have scroll back! ... which is the reason i don't care much for it.

e12e 12y ago

I've been using a few - in the end I landed on sakura: http://www.pleyades.net/david/projects/sakura http://www.pleyades.net/david/projects/sakura I don't quite remember why I ended up moving from urxvt to sakura (and not eg: roxterm) -- but I think it was a combination of it being light (enough), easy to set up without any kind of window decorations, as well as a sane way to pick and choose fonts. With the current gtk ~/.conf-scheme it has a nice ini-like config file, and I can easily have different font preferences on my laptop, my netbook and my desktop (all different screen sizes and different PPI). FFW I use a spartan xmonad setup, and typically run one, or a handful of terminal windows, each with their own gnu screen instance (typically one local, and a few remote screen instances over ssh. Sometimes I'll have more than one view/windows to one screen session -- and sometimes I might have a screen for a chroot or local vm/container of some sort).

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
emilburzo 12y ago
Thanks for letting me know about sakura, I think it's the first one to actually match the rendering speed of xterm. I do have one question though, why are the colors more pale in sakura than in xterm? And is there any way to change it?
- tenfingers 12y ago
  I have no idea about sakura, but being a libvte-based terminal, I highly doubt it's comparable (or even approaches) xterm in term of rendering speed. I'm wondering how people can compare these terminals mentioning speed, considering the actual performance is bound by libvte, and thus will be equally the same between roxterm, sakura, tilda, etc. What are they measuring? xterm is quite fast (in the order of 3-5x faster) than any libvte-based terminal. Try doing something like "time [term] -c 'cat <bigfile>'", and try varying the scrollback size to have a real measure. [u]rxvt in turn is even faster, especially with large scrollback buffers, which is the main (I could say only, really) reason I use it. As in, 10x faster than any libvte based terminal. I also use suckless tools (with spectrwm), though I never had a reason to investigate st. urxvt supports fallback fonts, which for UTF-8 text is essential.
  - emilburzo 12y ago
    > I'm wondering how people can compare these terminals mentioning speed, considering the actual performance is bound by libvte, and thus will be equally the same between roxterm, sakura, tilda, etc. What are they measuring? Not sure about others, but the first thing I test: dmesg; ps auxww; ls /dev I only really care about apparent speed and, like I said, sakura was the only one that was comparable to xterm. None of the other terminals I have tried (and only now I realize that they have libvte in common, thanks for that) have managed to perform acceptably (for me, at least).
- e12e 12y ago
  On my windoze box now, so can't check - but I think there should be something about colors in the right-click context menu? But I'm not entirely sure when (as in which version) palette/colorset support[1] was added -- it might not yet be in Debian stable? https://code.launchpad.net/~kraiskil/sakura/colorsets/+merge/167467 https://code.launchpad.net/~kraiskil/sakura/colorsets/+merge...
  - emilburzo 12y ago
    Awesome, thank you! If others have the same issue, it's: right click -> Options -> More -> Set Palette -> Xterm

lsiebert 12y ago

I like roxterm, but I recently switched to xfce's terminal, which lets me load it without a menu bar, (I like having more vertical space). More options are good.

lamby 12y ago
hide_menubar=1 in roxterm config :)
- lsiebert 12y ago
  Sorry that was unclear, I meant no menu bar and no drag bar with minimize and close buttons; my terminal window goes from the top of my screen to the bottom. I realize I can use a DE that lets me do that, but my preferred DE on linux atm is xfce itself. If there is a way to configure roxterm to not have a drag bar from inside the program, I have not found it.

1_player 12y ago

I've used gnome-terminal, sakura and now I'm using terminator: http://gnometerminator.blogspot.co.uk/p/introduction.html http://gnometerminator.blogspot.co.uk/p/introduction.html The main difference with the other terminal emulators is that I can easily do horizontal and vertical window splits. Many use screen or tmux for that but I find them too limiting, especially in their scrollback implementation.

staz 12y ago
Gnome-terminal, rox-term, sakura and terminator are actually all based on the same terminal emulation backend: libvte
gcb0 12y ago
i always found screen splitting in the terminal when you have a graphical window manager kinda of silly.
- kragniz 12y ago
  It means you can do screen splitting on a remote machine and still have the same workflow as your local sessions, which is pretty nice.
- glandium 12y ago
  I'd love it if there would be graphical frontend to tmux or screen. Something that would look very much like a terminal emulator, with tabs and splits, but backed by screen or tmux, whereby each tab or split window would be a tmux or screen window. And the awesome part is that when you're elsewhere, you could ssh in and attach to that tmux or screen session.
  - lmz 12y ago
    You can do that on OS X with iTerm2 e.g.: http://www.railsonmaui.com/blog/2014/03/11/rocking-with-tmux-tmuxinator-and-iterm2-for-rails-development/ http://www.railsonmaui.com/blog/2014/03/11/rocking-with-tmux...
  - 12y ago

middleclick 12y ago

I use the Xfce 4 Terminal on a i3 with no DE. Works wonderfully and has all the features I care for and need.

systems_glitch 12y ago
Same here. Very few dependencies.

gcb0 12y ago

st is not about rewriting xterm. it's about removing features, and then rewriting. for example, it doesn't even have scroll back! ... which is the reason i don't care much for it.