Once more, I’m toying with st. I actually might switch for real this time. My GTK/VTE terminal does work quite well (as long as I don’t port it from GTK 3 to GTK 4), but dealing with the nitty gritty details in st is just way more interesting. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de The only thing I’m missing in urxvt is the zoom. For unknown reasons, one day (probably after a system update) urxvt on my work computer was suddenly slow as shit. I could literally watch the lines render top to bottom like decades ago. So I had to switch to GNOME terminal (because that was already preinstalled on the distro). It still rendered instantly, just like urxvt used to. Especially when presenting something to team mates, I find it very useful to increase the font size on the fly with ^+. But also every now and then when I get a bit tired it’s nice to have a larger font. I reckon st is not capable of doing that either, or is it?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org To my surprise, st has builtin zoom. 🤯 I use that very often, too.

But vanilla st lacks other features that I, personally, find essential. For example a scrollback buffer. (That’s a very controversial topic in that community …) What you have to do, is go through this list and pick patches that you like:

https://st.suckless.org/patches/

Of course, they don’t all apply cleanly or are outright buggy sometimes, because anyone can push a patch to that list. There’s not really a strong review process.

At the end of the day, when you’re using st, you’re very likely effectively forking it. I’m not entirely sure yet if I’m up for that. 😅 Why do that anyway? Just for the fun of tinkering with it. 😅 The good thing is that upstream development has slowed down considerably in the last few years. It appears to be much more stable these days. Running my own st fork might actually be doable. We’ll see.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, nice! Yeah, maintaining an own fork seems like the way to go with suckless projects.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Going over the list of their projects, I think mainly dwm and st fall in that category. I also use a few others (dmenu, farbfeld, slock, xssstate, in the past also tabbed) which can be used “as is”. Granted, though, these are also much simpler. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Both wmi and wmii, too. :-) (But they fall into the category of dwm.) Right, my daily driver dmenu doesn’t need patches.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, wmii, I totally forgot about that one. :D That was a long, long time ago … I never used wmi, though.

(When it comes to the suckless project, though, I just don’t know how to deal with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Suckless.org :/ It’s all left a bit ambiguous and there’s never been a clear statement, afaik. Makes me uncomfortable, sorry.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hmm, strange. If it’s good software, I’m using it. Realisticly, no matter what in life, there will always be something by somebody who goes against my own principles. But that usually doesn’t make the product itself any worse. Btw. how did you discover that? I never go the discussion pages of articles. Do you?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Someone told me in a conversation a few years back. (I only found that link to wikipedia yesterday and it appeared to be a good starting point. 😅)

Yes, there’s always disagreement. But there are some things that I don’t want to tolerate/ignore. Also, there’s a difference between “it’s good software, I use it” and “hey, nice community, I want to be a part of it”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ah. Yup, these are different things.