
St: Simple terminal implementation for X - amarsahinovic
http://st.suckless.org/
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kelnos
_fonts (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.

~~~
jlgreco
That'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>

I guess the best way to describe it is they are along similar lines as the
'cat -v' folks.

~~~
kelnos
I 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.

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det23x
That'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
Maybe 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.

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dysoco
I'm a big fan of Suckless software, check out Sandy too:
<http://tools.suckless.org/sandy>

~~~
javert
Why 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
Because vi and emacs are just too complex and do things that should be done by
separate programs, like formatting?

~~~
dysoco
Exactly: 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_
vim, 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
vim 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.)

~~~
javert
In what sense do you dislike complexity? Is it "this software has too many
features," or "this software has too many lines of code," or "the code isn't
well-organized", or all the above, or something else? Don't take this as an
argument; I'm likely to be highly sympathetic to whatever you say.

I tend to dislike complexity in terms of user interface, and for the most
part, "out of sight is out of mind." That's why I have to use dwm over a more
typical desktop environment. So I don't really mind a command line program
that has a lot of options I don't use. Same thing for vim: I can easily just
ignore the features I don't use (the vast majority), because of the way vim is
designed.

~~~
demetrius
All the above; but they are closely related.

If the program has too many lines of code, it tends to be not too well
organised (because it usually means it does too much) and it usually means it
has too much features (thay could be easily moved into separate programs).

    
    
        > I can easily just ignore the features
        > I don't use (the vast majority)

Please excuse my blasphemous comparison, but how this is different from how
people use MS Word? :)

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adimitrov
This 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.

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klrr
Just to give you an impression of how small it is,

xterm 64K LOC rxvt 32K LOC st 3K LOC

(these numbers ain't precise)

~~~
MatthewPhillips
* Not including the Haskell runtime.

~~~
klrr
The 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).

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drbig
Does 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.)

~~~
icebraining
<http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1009/6046.html>

Don't let uriel read your request, though ;)

~~~
packetslave
I imagine that would be unlikely.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4654125>

~~~
icebraining
Oh. Crap, that's a shame, I had no idea. Thanks.

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kaolinite
If 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
gnome-terminal does it and probably the others based on the VTE widget also
do.

~~~
kaolinite
Not from my experience. Last tried in Ubuntu 10.10 and it didn't, unsure of
the exact version. Will double-check though as I may be wrong. I use the XFCE
terminal (also VTE based I believe) and that doesn't do it.

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_feda_
Try 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.

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stevenrace
As 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>

