On Sat, 16 May 2026 at 13:45, Steve Litt via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
Giles Orr via Talk said on Tue, 12 May 2026 13:31:26 -0400
Apologies for those who don't care about my epic terminal journey. I hope this will be the last update ... it probably won't be.
Having discovered that `st` doesn't support scrollback, I've decided it's not for me. Apparently the Suckless Tools programmers think you should use a terminal multiplexer (`screen` or `tmux` usually) inside your terminal if you want scrollback. Seriously? That's a lot of overhead, both for memory usage and mental modeling. No thanks. There are also software patches, but again: not interested in building my own if I can avoid it.
Building your own with Suckless Tools applications is a heck of a lot easier than with other applications, and the fact is, if you want to do something as simple as changing the font, it must be changed in the .h file and then recompiled. This is trivially easy, and is pretty much how Suckless Tools programs are intended to be configured.
(Apologies to SteveT - this is an over-reaction to your mostly innocent post. It became a trigger for a rant about a personal frustration.) ----- Saying "if you want to reconfigure, just edit the .h and rebuild" creates a massive divide between old school programmer-hacker-users (like you and me and many of the people on this list) and those who want an operating system that "just works." In the age of Microsoft continuously (and possibly deliberately) degrading their OS, I'd like to see Linux as an OS that's welcoming and relatively easy to use. But even if you argue that Suckless Tools are niche, intended for knowledgeable users like us and not newbies (Suckless has made it pretty clear that that's their intention) ... I think it's unwise to make it necessary to recompile to change settings. Configuration files to change minor settings are a GOOD THING that save users' time. Try to imagine if every piece of software you used (including the kernel, LibreOffice, everything) acted like Suckless: "you want to change that setting? You have to recompile." You'd set aside every Sunday for recompiles (and half your disk space for git repositories), and for the three days until you had the time to do the recompiles you'd be dealing with effectively misconfigured software. We'll always have small clusters of people who are in favour of being exclusionist - people who think hard-to-use Linux is good. And that's their right - although I feel like the only reasons they want it that way are A) so they're a member of an exclusive club, and/or B) they get to feel like wizards because their knowledge of Linux is more obvious. But I disagree with the exclusionist attitudes that go with this - for reasons both broad and personal. I want Linux to be welcoming, and I don't want to spend hours of my time recompiling. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com