The drama around this community is silly. I use these tools because I absolutely love their philosophy on software, and software alone. I couldn't care less what the authors personal beliefs and political leanings are, or who they offended on IRC or social media.
I recently spent a few hours evaluating different terminals. I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways. Most annoying of all is that I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to spend days of my life digging into their source code to make the changes I want, nor spend time pestering the maintainers to make the changes for me.
So I ended back at my st fork I've been using for years, which sucks... less. :) It consists of... 4,765 SLOC, of which I only understand a few hundred, but that's enough for my needs. I haven't touched the code in nearly 5 years, and the binary is that old too. I hope it compiles today, but I'm not too worried if it doesn't. This program has been stable and bug-free AFAICT for that long. I can't say that about any other program I use on a daily basis. Hhmm I suppose the GNU coreutils can be included there as well. But they also share a similar Unixy philosophy.
So, is this philosophy perfect? Far from it. But it certainly comes closer than any other approach at building reliable software. I've found that keeping complexity at bay is the most difficult, yet most crucial thing.[1]
> I couldn't care less what the authors personal beliefs and political leanings are, or who they offended on IRC or social media.
I just don't really want to use or support software by people who, at best, think it's appropriate to joke about an ideology that wants me [0] dead, or at worst, actively subscribe to that ideology. There are some things that I'm not willing to look past.
[0]: non-white, non-straight, left of the political spectrum
Having been on their mailing lists and IRC channel for over four years, I have seen maybe a handful of "edgy" comments that made me go "sigh" or "Ew!" and they are generally from two or so people that are on the fringe of the community. Yes, it is possible that this is some sort of elaborate trick, but they sure give the appearance of mostly a bunch of helpful folks that care deeply about their own code and projects while caring very little to police people and rather just ignore them.
Oh, there are also the edgelords occasionally lured in by Luke Smith's videos (who has never sat foot in community or contributed code while I have been around and I am not sure if he ever did) who usually get laughed out of IRC after delivering an unhinged chanspeak rant.
> ... and they are generally from two or so people that are on the fringe of the community.
How do the people at the center of the community react to this, though? If they are not condemning that sort of behavior, and possibly kicking people like that out of the community, then they are complicit at best, and tacitly approve at worst.
Fair question. I never really seen it on the mailing lists, as those are low volume and technical.
Looking at my IRC logs over the last six months I see one joke-ish comment from a fringe person that VT100 clearly must be racist as it does not support Unicode skin colour emoji merging and one core-ish member chuckling (I will not quote as I find doing so without consent to be morally questionable). This took place in a mostly technical discussion about the complexity of "improving" Unicode handling in st(1). That is it.
I have never really seen something so bad that I would argue for a ban (but that is of course a subjective judgement) and there is a line of thought that ignoring is better than trying to build a wall of rules and "feeding" the trolls by going after them. Whether this is true I am not sure, but I happily take part in both stricter and more lenient communities myself and can see advantages and disadvantages of both.
I get that, they're probably assholes. But if I limited my usage of software and consumption of art to only those not authored by assholes, I would probably have a less enjoyable and boring existence. Not to mention exhausting.
I think it's possible to separate the art from the artist, and enjoy the art without being concerned about the artist's beliefs, and whether I disagree with them.
Also, you don't necessarily support them by using their software. The software is free to use by anyone, and you never have to interact with the authors in any way. Software is an amorphous entity. Unless they're using it to spread their personal beliefs, it shouldn't matter what that is. By choosing not to use free software, you're only depriving yourself.
But this is your own choice, of course, and I'm not saying it's wrong. Just offering a different perspective.
I think you're setting up a too-general argument here. "Asshole" an encompass a huge variety of things, from "actively genocidal" to just "kinda annoying", and everything in between.
I'm pretty "mainstream" demographically (white, straight, cisgender), but if the developer of software I use said something like "all atheists should be shot", I would immediately stop using their software and find something else.
> By choosing not to use free software, you're only depriving yourself.
Sometimes making a statement means enduring some sort of disadvantage or hardship in return. In fact I think that's part of the point. If it doesn't cost me anything to stop supporting something I find offensive, then my (admittedly mild) protest doesn't really have much substance behind it.
In this particular case, there's nothing that the suckless folks have built that doesn't have alternatives that are also free software, so I don't think anyone who refuses to use suckless software is depriving themselves of free software.
That would indeed be concerning if true; do you have a reference? Unfortunately, the vast majority of such claims I've found to be misconstrued which makes me skeptical (the boy keeps crying wolf).
Then, when people are no longer allowed to talk about what (stupid shit) they believe and jokes should only be made behinds peoples back.
Who should be on the committee that decides what we may talk and joke about and how should the committee inform it self?
The new forbidden topics will be chosen from the set of topics people talk about which get smaller, stranger and more political. What people secretly believe will be much closer to the secret dialog while the public dialog floats away.
That people are saying things is the least of your concern.
Fascinating perspective tho. It is much easier if one is more secure, talks easy or has a more mundane world view. Not someone one can choose. Thicker skin however.
Also interesting, if one didn't like the people running the lunchroom at the end of the street or didn't like the visitors you use to be able to go to some other place. Today they are all part of the same chain. We've lost a lot of freedom there.
It's honestly distressing how all of these violent ideologies are growing in popularity. Nazism, socialism, and whatever else should be thrown on the pile. If you're a queer black "executive" like myself, there are a lot of people that believe the world would be a better place with you dead.
It's getting to the point that I'm considering keeping myself ignorant of developers' beliefs for my own mental wellness.
That's because in modern (at least US) parlance, "socialism" can mean anything from "mild redistribution of resources with taxation and spending" to "Stalinist purges". Clearly the violence is on one side of that spectrum (unless you believe taxation is theft and inherently violent, which... I've heard is a belief). It's almost a meaningless word these days.
Because fixating on politics is bad for one's own mental health, and toxic for the community. It turns everything into a flame war about politics and divides, rather than unites, people. It suffocates interesting and worthwhile discussions. And on top of that, it doesn't even accomplish anything good to make those downsides worth it.
> I just don't really want to use or support software by people who, at best, think it's appropriate to joke about an ideology that wants me dead
It never ceases to amaze me that some people can dismiss ideologies that advocate for personal threats of violence against a particular group of people as "politics".
> I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways.
After moving to a gigantic monitor and gigantic resolutions, my poor st fork was suffering. zutty was a great replacement for me: https://git.hq.sig7.se/zutty.git
I use foot and with a catpucchin theme , oh it's so nice and cozy.
I use pure zsh with some plugins manually installed , the luke smith dot files, and the history part sometimes take a lot to load but foot is just fast
> I couldn't care less what the authors personal beliefs and political leanings are, or who they offended on IRC or social media.
I agree. Such things are not relevant when considering to use their formats and programs and stuff like that.
What is relevant is their software and related stuff like that, and not their political leanings, etc. I do not agree with all of their ideas about computer software, although I agree with some of them.
Like them, I also don't like systemd, so I agree with them about not liking systemd.
I do use farbfeld, although I wrote all of the software for doing so by myself rather than using their software (although it should be interoperable with their software, and any other software that supports farbfeld (such as ImageMagick)). Also, I do not use farbfeld for disk files, but only with pipes. (My farbfeld utilities package also includes the only XPM encoder/decoder that I know of that supports some of the uncommon features, that most XPM encoders/decoders I know of are not compatible with or are not fully capable of.)
I may consider libzahl if I have a use for big integers, although I also might not need it. (I had written some dealing with big integers before; one program I wrote (asn1.c) that deals with big integers only converts between base 100 and base 128 in order to convert OIDs between text and binary format.)
However, I would also want software that can better handle non-Unicode text (so, it is one things I try to write), which many programs don't do properly. This should mean that any code that deals with Unicode (if any) is bypassed when non-Unicode is used. Some programs should not need to support Unicode at all (including some that should not need to care about character encoding at all, or that do not deal with text, etc). (I had considered writing my own terminal emulator for this and other reasons.)
> I recently spent a few hours evaluating different terminals. I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways
Last time I did the same (days not hours tho lol) was somewhat surprised to find myself landing on xterm. After resolving a couple of gotchas (reliable font-resizing is somewhat esoteric; neovim needs `XTERM=''`; check your TERM) I have been very pleased and not looked back.
It also makes for very "efficient" software, the amount of time Sent has saved me, with very minor styling modifications, makes it one of the best software I've ever used.
> spent a few hours evaluating different terminals. I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways.
If you don't mind, tell more? I use kitty and it seems a big upgrade from whatever I used before...
Whenever suckless comes up, I see more people saying "the drama is silly" than I do actual drama. I don't even know what drama people are talking about.
* One of the lead devs' laptops is named after Hitler's hideout in the forest
* Their 2017 conference had a torchwalk that was a staple of Nazi youth camping (and heavily encouraged by the SS as a nationalism thing)
* Multiple of the core devs are just assholes to people on and offline.
* Most of the suckless philosophy is "It does barely what it needs to and it was built by us, so it's superior to what anyone else has written". A lot of it shows in dwm, dmenu, etc.
Seconding the need for a source. Hypothetically, it could have been. The Unite the Right Rally was 11 to 12 August 2017 [1] and slcon 2017 1 to 3 September [2].
As I pointed out in another comment though. If these guys are diehard Nazis, they sure are keeping it for the conventions as I have seen nothing of it on the mailing lists or IRC for four or so years. What I have seen though are about a handful of Anarchists with varying degrees of involvement, but overall politics is pretty rare and it is mostly about using their software, programming in general, and how to find software that complies with their overall ideology.
> I like dwm, and dwm being pro-fascist would be disappointing to me.
How is dwm, a piece of software, part of a political ideology? If the program and its source code promoted a specific belief, that would be one thing. But I haven't seen that in any of the suckless tools I use.
My comments weren't meant to trivialize anything the authors may or may not believe. I'm just saying that I personally don't care what that is, even if I may disagree with it. The software they produce is not in any way tainted by this.
This is the "separate the art from the artist" mentality and some people can't do it as art is expression and see the art as supporting the views of the artist. You might think it is a stretch to apply this to a window manager but I see where people are coming from.
That's why I said it'd be "disappointing". I wouldn't be happy about it. But I'm not sure I'd stop using it. After all, I'm not sure how it can itself be "pro-fascist". (If anything I'd suspect Wayland compositors of said allegiances more. /s)
Not defending them, the Hitler laptop thing seems bad, but within Germany torchwalks are pretty normal and not Nazi associated. For example, there was one as part of a ceremony honoring Merkel as she left office.
There is a difference between a independently organized torchwalk, which especially after Charlottesville internationally gained popularity in far-right circles, and a "Zapfenstrich", a military honor granted to high ranking military/political leaders, which is tradition when the German chancelor/president leaves office.
Yes, there are definitely also normal torchwalks in Germany (I have been part of some as part of church youthgroups). However with all the other information that has surfaced about suckless over the years, it really doesn't look like a coincidence that they choose that as a group activity on their get together over all other possible things you could be doing.
The only reason I know "torch walks" and "far right" are somehow associated is because of this whole suckless thing that keeps coming back. Not everyone has the US news cycle intravenously injected. In my home town there's a yearly torch walk to celebrate the end of the occupation, and this hasn't changed because of Charlottesville.
As for "all the other information that has surfaced about suckless": there really isn't anything other than that hostname. I have actually asked the person with that hostname directly twice, and they opted not to answer. I agree it's not a good look, especially in the context of some other posts from that person. But it's not a good look for that person, not for all of suckless. If you look at all Python devs, or all Rust devs, or all HN posters, or all people 1.86cm in height: there's bound to be some unpleasant people there. It's just how things work.
And if you're going to make an accusation as serious as that then you really need to do better than "surely it can't be a coincidence..." Personally I'd say that a community which coalesced around a particular view on software also happens to have similar extreme political views as something that's rather unlikely.
The entire reason this whole "suckles are Nazis" thing is even a thing is because a single person kept bringing it up on HN, Lobsters and Twitter. As near as I can tell, it's a pretty successful campaign from one exceedingly toxic person with a grudge.
I mean, having just learned about this drama, it sounds like they might be Nazis? Or at least have Nazi tendencies? Sounds like you have to chalk a few things up to coincidence to not even consider the possibility.
Like I said, the only "coincidence" is the torch walk thing. This isn't Elon "I am just throwing my heart out, and oh I also built the world's leading platform for antisemitism and retweeted antisemitic posts" Musk we're talking about here.
It's not the only coincidence, though. One of their hosts is named after Hitler's military headquarters, and one of them has been known to go off about "Cultural Marxism," a very specific term most often used to covertly slip antisemitism into the conversation.
> One of their hosts is named after Hitler's military headquarters
If by "their" you mean a suckless.org host, no, that's not true. A hostname in the outgoing mail headers of one person posting to the mailing list was "wolfsschanze", i.e., a machine on that user's LAN, not a suckless.org server. The person in question was FRIGN. This got attention because he personally repeatedly pestered Lennart Poettering, who noticed that string in the mail headers and called it out on Twitter. https://web.archive.org/web/20190404160024/https://twitter.c...
Lennart correctly noted that this hostname was one person's laptop, but this morphed in the public consciousness to "a suckless host is named after Hitler's HQ".
> one of them has been known to go off about "Cultural Marxism,"
I hear these same two things repeated over and over as evidence of nazism within suckless (example, the Wikipedia talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Suckless.org), but it is one person (who, granted, maintains at least one suckless.org project https://suckless.org/people/FRIGN/). I think badly of him as a result, but I don't see any reason to disbelieve the multiple Germans who tell me that torchlit walks are a common German tradition, or to tie it to the Charlottesville march, which was extremely untraditional in the region it took place in.
The thing that always bothers me about the "it's just one person" defense is... well, what about the other prominent members of the community? How do they feel about this person's beliefs and behavior?
I work on Xfce in my spare time with a small group of other developers from around the world, and if I learned that one of them was a neo-nazi, I would immediately call for them to be expelled from the community. If the other maintainers refused, I would step down and leave the community myself.
To me, any other response would be tolerating and accepting neo-nazism, to the point that I would assume and expect outsiders would suspect the entire development team is ok with neo-nazism. None of that is ok in my book.
> I work on Xfce in my spare time with a small group of other developers from around the world, and if I learned that one of them was a neo-nazi...
I think FRIGN is odious but my judgment is that a gross edgy joke (the hostname) and one reference to "cultural marxism"* isn't sufficient to call someone a neo-nazi. Well, more importantly, believing it isn't sufficient (as I do, and I suspect the suckless people do) does not mean people like me or the suckless people are, as you word it, "tolerating or accepting neo-nazism".
*Despite Wikipedia's only page on cultural marxism being a redirect to "Cultural Marxism anti-semitic far-right conspiracy theory", it is not unusual to rail against cultural marxism in normal conservative circles, including respectable anti-Trump anti-anti-semitic circles like National Review and Tablet. See for example https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/just-becaus... ; but I don't want to veer this thread into off-topicness, only to provide evidence that complaining about cultural marxism doesn't make someone a neo-nazi.
He seems very comfortable repeating what is essentially the propaganda of Neonazi groups like PEGIDA.
I agree that we should be sceptical of extreme claims. Maybe it's a coincidence that they did their torchlit walk just after the Charlottesville march. Maybe it's just one of them who is willing to use Nazi references when naming his devices. Maybe it's just a weird fringe that posts Neonazi propaganda online. But the more these individual things come together, the more they build a picture, and the more it behoves us to take this picture seriously.
> What about the comments from metux/Enrico Weigelt?
Yep, that seems straightforwardly bad. Even so, I don't consider metux a suckless.org guy, but rather a deplorable person who contributes to multiple projects, one of which is hosted on suckless.org. The link you posted was from a Devuan mailing list.
Someone else used the example of Xfce, but suckless.org is a much more informal place that basically is a collection of separate projects with a similar aesthetic.
> But the more these individual things come together, the more they build a picture,
Sure, judgmments like yours are reasonable. I wouldn't begrudge someone choosing to avoid suckless over it, or even publicly voicing concern about the suckless community. But it's tiresome when every comment thread ostensibly about dwm, dmenu and st receives wild accusations of suckless.org being a community of nazis.
And I really think there's zero evidence of the torch walk being anything at all.
I think that's a fair point. I also don't like reading these sorts of threads, and I only got drawn into this one because I get very defensive about Dresden, and very fed up of neo-nazis trying to co-opt the city for their own ends.
For the record, though, no one who gives a downvote should ever feel obligated to reply. Writing out a thoughtful, supported disagreement to something takes work, and often the effort required exceeds what anyone might want to expend.
This is especially true if a comment feels like it's especially bad-faith-y (though I'm not saying that's the case for your comment).
Your comments don't "deserve" anything. You've decided to spend your time making a point on a random web forum, and that's your choice to make. But you do not get to decide that others are required to spend that time as well when agreeing or disagreeing with your words, regardless of whether or not they've used their voting privileges, in either direction.
> For the record, though, no one who gives a downvote should ever feel obligated to reply. Writing out a thoughtful, supported disagreement to something takes work, and often the effort required exceeds what anyone might want to expend.
Sure, I agree. I counter that it means not that my comments didn't deserve a reply, but that due in part to what you correctly stated, not all comments that deserve replies get them. :)
Again, as I already said, that's the server of a single person. Not "their" (community) server. The post about the "cultural marxism" on Lobsters was the same person, posting on his personal account. And again, as I have already said, I was not impressed by this either. But you can't just extrapolate that to all of "suckless".
The unhinged rant about how WW2 was the fault of everyone but Germany, how the AfD aren't the far right, how Holocaust denial should be legalised, and how the far left are trying to destroy Dresden - that is from someone else (metux).
Having one far-right loon in your team might just raise some eyebrows. A second, however, shows a pattern.
notably they did this only a few weeks after the "unite the right" white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, which IIRC is where the whole tiki torch thing started
I don't think it matters. The rise of white supremacist in the US has echos throughout the world as far-right parties feel emboldened. The world follows America for better or worse.
+1 to that. Exactly the same. I customised dwm way back and keep a
personal version around that I tweak and compile now and then. It's a
couple hundred lines of cleanish C code.
What I love is that I forget it's there. For years I simply forget I
have a "window manager" because to me its a dozen keyboard shortcuts
as a shim for managing terminals. If emacs could do that as invisibly
I'd be a super happy chappie.
No. "The Wolf's Lair" does indeed sound like it could just refer to some place where a wolf lives. "Wolfsschanze" in German does not have the same connotation. ("Schanze" actually translates more literally to something like "fort".) No German would think of that as just neutrally describing a place where a wolf lives. It is 100% linked to the WWII bunkers.
It's one thing to be an asshole, it's quite another to subscribe to Nazi ideology.
Linus Torvalds, for example, used to be a raging asshole, but as far as I know he was just a dick to other people who had pissed him off. He wasn't advocating for genocide or stripping rights away from people or whatever.
This FRIGN guy seems like he might be a part of the latter group. If true, that makes him a very different kind of asshole, the kind we do not welcome into our communities.
I'm not sure how you missed it, since it comes up in practically every Suckless-related thread[1], including this one. The drama is mostly in social media and IRC circles, though it tends to spill over here as well.
> I'm not going to spend days of my life digging into their source code to make the changes I want
This is an odd thing to bring up though because that's quite literally the only way to make any changes to suckless software, editing source code in C.
The entire philosophy behind is entirely performative in many ways. There's nothing simple or "unbloated" about having to recompile a piece of software every time you want to make what should really be a runtime user configuration, and it makes an entire compiler toolchain effectively a dependency for even the most trivial config change.
I tried their window manager out once and the only way to add some functionality through plugins is to apply source code patches, but there's no guarantee that the order doesn't mess things up, so you basically end up manually stitching pieces of code together for functionality that is virtually unrelated. It's actual madness from a complexity standpoint.
> This is an odd thing to bring up though because that's quite literally the only way to make any changes to suckless software, editing source code in C.
You're ignoring the part where the tools are often a fraction of the size and complexity of similar tools. I can go through a 5K SLOC program and understand it relatively quickly, even if I'm unfamiliar with the programming language or APIs. I can't do the same for programs 10 or 100x that size. The code is also well structured and documented IME, so changing it is not that difficult.
In practice, once you configure the program to your liking, you rarely have to recompile it again. Like I said, I'm using a 5 year old st binary that still works exactly how I want it to.
Maintaining a set of patches is usually not a major problem either. The patches are often small, and conflicts are rare, but easily fixable. Again, in my experience, which will likely be different from yours. Our requirements for how we want the software to work will naturally be different.
The madness you describe to me sounds like a feature. It intentionally makes it difficult to add a bunch of functionality to the software, which is also what keeps it simple.
I'm not a C programmer, so it would probably personally take me days, maybe weeks to fully grok 5K SLOC of C. Still, it is potentially possible if I made the effort, unlike with other programs, like you say.
It's a testament to the quality of the original C code that I was able to configure and use st and other suckless tools with my limited experience. An experienced C developer would probably find it a breeze.
I have a small config for Kitty that does not require any patching and recompilation and can survive Kitty updates for years to come. I don't understand why I need to study the source code of my terminal emulator.
I quite liked Kitty, and wanted to keep using it. But the slow startup was a deal breaker for me. Even with `--single-instance` it was at least 5x that of st for me, which is noticeable for an app I use very frequently. Besides, I'm not a fan of running a single instance of any app, since if (when) it crashes, all my work is gone.
Then I had a look around their issue tracker, and noticed others complained about this too[1]. And the dismissive and defensive response from the author just rubbed me the wrong way.
Strange, it actually endeared him to me. Thanks for the link. I guess some crusty part of me enjoys seeing someone who actually knows what they are talking about not putting up with whiny demanding randos on the internet. I might even give kitty a second chance on windows, to clarify I don't think you are wrong to feel the way you do, it just gave me a chuckle how differently different people parse things.
Not when you want to write your own patches, it isn't. I think the design of DWM could be improved to make patching easier, but it was a revelation to me when I discovered it: for the first time in my life, I was using open source software that was actually designed to be extended.
Sometimes, I have had to change software (although not from suckless, since I do not use any of their software) by modifying and recompiling it, to do what I wanted.
> There's nothing simple or "unbloated" about having to recompile a piece of software every time you want to make what should really be a runtime user configuration, and it makes an entire compiler toolchain effectively a dependency for even the most trivial config change.
It is true, but depending on the software, sometimes this is acceptable. (Some of the internet server software that I wrote (such as scorpiond) are configured in this way, in order to take advantage of compiler optimizations.)
For some other programs, some things will have to be configured at compile time (mostly things that probably don't need to be changed after making a package of this program in some package manager), although most things can be configured at run time and do not need to be onfigured at compile time.
> I tried their window manager out once and the only way to add some functionality through plugins is to apply source code patches, but there's no guarantee that the order doesn't mess things up, so you basically end up manually stitching pieces of code together for functionality that is virtually unrelated. It's actual madness from a complexity standpoint.
This is a valid criticism, and is why I don't do that for my own software. However, it is sometimes useful to make your own modifications to existing programs, but just applying sets of patches that do not necessarily match is the madness that you describe.
I recently spent a few hours evaluating different terminals. I went back to urxvt, tried Alacritty again, gave Ghostty a try, and spent quite some time configuring Kitty. After all this I found that they all suck in different ways. Most annoying of all is that I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to spend days of my life digging into their source code to make the changes I want, nor spend time pestering the maintainers to make the changes for me.
So I ended back at my st fork I've been using for years, which sucks... less. :) It consists of... 4,765 SLOC, of which I only understand a few hundred, but that's enough for my needs. I haven't touched the code in nearly 5 years, and the binary is that old too. I hope it compiles today, but I'm not too worried if it doesn't. This program has been stable and bug-free AFAICT for that long. I can't say that about any other program I use on a daily basis. Hhmm I suppose the GNU coreutils can be included there as well. But they also share a similar Unixy philosophy.
So, is this philosophy perfect? Far from it. But it certainly comes closer than any other approach at building reliable software. I've found that keeping complexity at bay is the most difficult, yet most crucial thing.[1]
[1]: https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-complexity