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Comment by aexaey | Hacker News Reader

This.

Also, one should keep in mind that having to apply personal patches is perfectly acceptable for suckless software. In fact, for the very same st, to change font, colour scheme, or hotkeys/shortcuts - one has to edit config.h file and recompile. There is no traditional text config file or "Preferences" menu.

This might sound bizarre at first, but actually works as well as editing a text config file: config.h is very well structured and compilation only takes fraction of a second. Better yet, you're not constrained by opinions of previous commiters on what should be configurable and what - not. Which is the whole point, actually.

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> Also, one should keep in mind that having to apply personal patches is perfectly acceptable for suckless software.

I don't get it. This patch increases the code base by merely 60 lines of code (104 insertions, 44 deletions).

Is 60 lines already considered bloat, in a verbose language like C?

Also, is this meant to lead to fewer complexity? Maintaining the patch separately from the code base is nothing but cumbersome. Essentially this is a long-time feature branch, which is a well-known anti-pattern regarding software quality and maintenance. What if there are more and more of such patches? What if they overlap and can't be applied together? In a central code base these formal conflicts would be resolved once and for everyone, early on.

I would have expected this feature (and its code) to be enabled/disabled by a single #define in config.h. That would be more consistent with the suckless philosophy of configuration. Or, reducing that bloat by simply enabling it always.

>Is 60 lines already considered bloat, in a verbose language like C?

It's more about features. tmux and screen are widely used, so a lot of people won't need that functionality to be duplicated. Keeping extra features separate lets the users pick and choose what they want.

It's also worth noting that suckless's software is not meant for someone who wants a turnkey solution. It's meant to be customized by most every user.

> Is 60 lines already considered bloat, in a verbose language like C?

Due to high code quality, removing even 10 lines is an achievement for suckless.org projects. Try it yourself and submit a patch to mailing list if you succeed.

> Also, is this meant to lead to fewer complexity? Maintaining the patch separately from the code base is nothing but cumbersome.

Maintaining feature as a patch prevents you from weaving it deep inside the code, adding hooks here and there just to make it work. It is harder to do, but it is the right way to make sure all feature related logic is kept in one place.

I have some pet suckless inspired projects. During development I introduced some useless features such as pthread support just because I learned about them. Then once I realized they are useless I removed them. It greatly improved code structure.

> Maintaining feature as a patch prevents you from weaving it deep inside the code, adding hooks here and there just to make it work. It is harder to do, but it is the right way to make sure all feature related logic is kept in one place.

I'm used to achieve this by keeping each topic in a separate module (in C: function or file, in other languages: module, class, whatever). You'd then have clear entry points into that module.

Interestingly, the given patch isn't structured like that. So I'd argue that code would benefit from becoming a first-class citizen in the code base. As a patch it just gives the illusion of a well-separated feature. (Because a patch file is always a single file, no matter how much the changes are scattered around in the code base.)

> I have some pet suckless inspired projects. During development I introduced some useless features such as pthread support just because I learned about them. Then once I realized they are useless I removed them. It greatly improved code structure.

I fully agree that removing useless features does not only shorten, but simplify code. However, given that by far not everybody uses screen/tmux, I disagree with the "scrolling is useless" assumption here.

> to change font, colour scheme, or hotkeys/shortcuts

No, you don't have to recompile it. For shortcuts, sure, but I haven't used any st shortcuts besides font size +/-.

Colors can be changed via the shell e.g. https://github.com/chriskempson/base16-shell and the font is passed via the -f flag.

What I dislike about this, is that I have to manually track new versions -- rather than just have my package manager pull in new versions that read a `st.conf` file.

Also, I like different colors for different things. Production server terminals look different that staging server terminals that look different than development terminals.

As floatboth pointed out above, it is possible to use a shell script [1] to dynamically change terminal colour mapping. Add this as "LocalCommand" to appropriate "Host staging-foo" and "Host production-bar" sections of the ~/.ssh/config file, and you're all set.

[1] https://github.com/chriskempson/base16-shell

Gentoo's package manager (Portage) deals with this quite nicely for packages like st [1].

Both custom patches and config.h changes can be saved in the package manager, which will then apply them automatically to new versions.

[1] https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/x11-terms/st

It is still bizarre because not every user wants to and/or doesn't have the skills to do that.

Yes, and that's perfectly ok. These people simply aren't the target audience, just like you wouldn't recommend Arch to a Linux beginner.

Exactly. I would never use it, but I'm perfectly alright having something targeting a niche perfectly. It's better than trying to please everybody and ending up being "meh".

Not having the skills isn't the thing that should stop someone in either scenario, it's not wanting the skills. Arch is great for a beginner that wants to know how to set up their own bootloader and similar things, you can use Ubuntu for years without gaining that knowledge. Or how much C editing and compiling does the average Unix user happen to run into?

There's very little natural progression in computer use, people do things the way they know how until they decide to learn more. Think of how many time's you've seen some family member slowly select file-save without ever figuring out ctrl-s.

if you don't like it than fork it

I find in hard to fork human behavior and have anything one might consider a good adoption rate.

Agreed in general. (As a small counterpoint: I helped a beginner get familiar with Linux. We tried Ubuntu first, and she hated it. She switched to Arch and has been happy ever since.)

What lisaberlin wrote applies - suckless is like Unix: user friendly, just very selective about who it decides to make friends with.

But in this case, I would disagree. The file is quite readable (way more than most text config files I've seen), and the single command to compile is even included in the README. If you're the kind of person that purposefully downloads a new terminal, rather than using the built-in one, you can probably configure st just fine.

Seems like kind of a pretentious choice... they've structured their program so the config file is a .h file just so you can feel cool when you compile it to change font size?

I suspect it's not so you feel cool, but because it means the program doesn't need a parser for config files, and because it's more flexible.

parserless configuration is easily achieved with stuff like envdir: https://cr.yp.to/daemontools/envdir.html

That just parses environment variables, instead of files.

Not to mention that it's yet another dependency, which is another thing that's avoided by doing configuration through a header file.

> suckless is like Unix: user friendly, just very selective about who it decides to make friends with

I like to use the term "super-user friendly", as a compliment.

The Xmonad window manager is configured by editing its source code as well, and believe me, you don't have to know Haskell to do it. They pushed the DSL approach to a point where the main function reads like a configuration file, whose format can be learned just by looking at it.

this is not entirely true, xmonad's config file happens to be a haskell file, but I don't need to recompile the whole xmonad project if I want to change it, I just start xmonad again.

It does some tricks to do this (mainly the _main_ xmonad executable compiles a custom binary for you taking the xmonad.hs as input), but it's a different case.

http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Doc-Conf...

If this experience has been improved, I might try xmonad again. I used it for 2.5 years but switched to i3 in 2013 after finding myself in cabal hell for the umpteenth time. Recompiling GHC to make my window manager work was not my idea of a good time.

I switched from xmonad to another window manager and eventually to i3 many years ago, and there's no way I'm going back.

Yes, you can do simple stuff in xmonad without knowing Haskell. But for more complicated stuff, you have to either copy and paste code that you don't understand, or ask someone who knows Haskell to write it for you. And there's no way you're going to be able to do troubleshoot non-obvious problems without either knowing Haskell or once again asking someone who knows Haskell to do it for you. That's way too much of a pain in the ass.

Configuring and troubleshooting i3 doesn't require knowing Haskell, is really simple, flexible enough for what I need, and any advanced functionality I want it to perform I can program in my own language of choice.

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