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Comment by satai | Hacker News Reader

I can't help myself: suckless sucks. Lots of arbitrary limitations for the code, need to recompile instead of configuration, optimizing for a wrong usage scenario.

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Even though I can't stand to use their software (or their aesthetic, or their ethos...) I'm very grateful that suckless exists. The source serves as an excellent reference if you want to learn, say, how a (non-trivial) window manager works, or how IRC is implemented in practice, or how to wrap the WebKit/GTK+ interface. The code is usually quite straightforward, and the lack of features/config makes it fast and easy to see what's going on.

I think the suckless project has correctly identified that a lot of software sucks, but their attempts to make it "suck less" are focusing on the wrong points. A lot of mainstream software is grossly inefficient, bloated and resource-intensive, and that's not necessarily because they're featureful. It's certainly possible to write software that is both featureful and efficient, but suckless aggressively cuts features instead of optimising, to reduce the perception of inefficiency; what's left is not necessarily efficient.

In fact, I don't remember the details now but I recall looking at the source for another one of the suckless applications and finding some pretty inefficient algorithms. I think the other comment here about st being CPU-intensive with high output rates is an example of this.

Ironically, one of the reasons I think mainstream software sucks is because newer versions also tend to remove configurability and features often for the same goal of reducing bloat.

For better or worse, Suckless's problem isn't with code bloat so much as code complexity. More features mean more code to debug. Better algorithms can also mean more code to debug. If you constrain your design scope, you can write vastly simpler programs that are more stable and easier to comprehend.

It's the same rationale that leads one to use a pen and paper rather than a note taking app.

I find that most of their software is targeted towards beginner/intermediate hackers. Having to recompile /forces/ you to tinker with the source code. When I was learning how to code I would hack the shit out of my window manager (dwm), I learned a lot of C in the process. When you think about it that way, the "arbitrary limitations" on lines of code and everything else starts to make sense.

I agree most of their stuff isn't targeted toward the average user, just this small niche. Their browser, surf, doesn't even support tabs as far as I can remember.

> Their browser, surf, doesn't even support tabs as far as I can remember.

There is a general tabbing frontend that allows you to tab all sorts of applications: http://tools.suckless.org/tabbed.

I've never used surf, but I really do like tabbed. It plays super nicely with most tiling window managers I've used, and lets me get the single best feature (ymmv) of i3 on xmonad.

Could you elaborate on how you use tabbed with i3, and how it's better than simply using i3's native tiling features?

emacs had a similar effect on me. Configuration is all in elisp so you can happily tumble down a rabbit hole of tweaking settings and find yourself learning all kinds of interesting lispy ideas.

You're clearly not their target audience if those are your takeaways. But there are lots of people out there who do prefer to recompile instead of configure and find suckless feature sets to be inline with their own requirements. To say that a product "sucks" because they don't cater specifically to your arbitrary desires is grossly unfair.

Well, I mean that's what they're doing as well. They call features other people use and require "bloat" and pretty much say they all suck.

I think it's fair to say suckless code is clean and minimalist. But it definitely isn't suckless.

I think they're not trying to be suckless, but merely to suck less.

First of all it is "suck less" not "suckless". ie "less bloat/features" rather than "hey look at our perfect software". This is a point reiterated on their site repeatedly (including the <title> tag on their home page: http://suckless.org/)

Secondly, it's all very tongue in cheek. After all it's aimed at the OpenBSD crowd and like minded people. It's not really meant to be taken literally by the general computing audience - not even within the wider FOSS community.

Lastly it's sad day for HN when negative comments get up-voted and positive comments defending niche software get down-voted. What happened to respecting our peers and acknowledging the massively wide range of personal preferences and usage habits?

> What happened to respecting our peers and acknowledging the massively wide range of personal preferences and usage habits?

I absolutely wasn't trying to be disparaging of them. I understand that there are people who love their work, and I love some of their software (dmenu).

My point was more toward the parent I was replying to - i.e., that the message from the suck-less crowd that other pieces of software "suck" is just an opinion. In the same way that they think (for example) the KDE desktop sucks, it's allowed to think that their products suck.

But I suppose that it can be seen as disrespectful, and I understand that. There is definitely room for airing one's opinion in a less inflammatory way.

> To say that a product "sucks" because they don't cater specifically to your arbitrary desires is grossly unfair.

Then again, if they name their project(s) "suck less", it's completely fair to say it sucks. If they can have arbitrary standards about what constitutes suckage, why not us?

Extending `st` with a config reader is super duper easy.

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