Software That Sucks Less

https://suckless.org/philosophy/

by jhallenworld • 6 years ago

198 162 6 years ago

suckless.org

Kuinox7• 6 years ago

Wonderful.

dwm, dmenu, and st.

Good naming is required to have code of good quality. These name are too short, they lack of clarity.

A good name is concise, give the point, and is pronoucable.

KingMachiavelli• 6 years ago

I love the names:

dynamic window manager, dynamic menu, suckless terminal

The names are all very clear once you know the naming convention.

geofft• 6 years ago

Is that a convention, or just what they stand for? (Do the window manager and the menu suck, because they don't have the "s" prefix? Is st static because it doesn't have the "d" prefix? Why do we abbreviate "terminal" but not "menu" / why not follow the established abbreviation of "term" as in xterm, dtterm, eterm, etc.? How come the "s" prefix in sprop and sselp stands for "simple" instead of "suckless"?)

koenigdavidmj• 6 years ago

dwm: Don’t care what the D stands for, but there are a bunch of X11 window managers ending in ‘wm’ so that’s probably what this is too.

dmenu: Since it’s coming from the same place as dwm, it’s probably a menu app that goes well with it.

st isn’t obvious, I agree, but it makes sense to give a short name to the program you use most frequently.

Kuinox7• 6 years ago

The origin of the name are clear, but the name itself should describe what is it because these name can be find out of context.

These names can't be easily understandood without context. And these name will be found without context: For exemple, you may meet this name in a process list. In this case you don't understand why the process "dwm" is eating a lot of gpu power.

A variable name can be short, because it's name will be found in it's context.

paedubucher5• 6 years ago

Is plan9 a good name for an operating system? It's named after (arguably) the worst movie ever. It's even bad as a trash movie. Is the code quality of plan9 bad?

nix237• 6 years ago

And Linux is named after a rude developer..or Washing-soap..who knows. An Oracle is the opposite you want of a Database, but Intel made a really good promise for others (Meltdown's). Google the searchengine is written wrong -> Goggles and and and ;)

Kuinox7• 6 years ago

Are you comparing an operating system with a window manager ?

We name products with odd name because they are products, you want to be different.

Parts of this product are rarely named differently, a windshield is still called a windshield, not a "wdsd".

jolmg5• 6 years ago

Some projects seem missing from the site. For example, this used to be the home of wmi[1] and wmii[2], the ancestors of i3.

There's quite a bit to see if one browses the site through the WaybackMachine.

I could've sworn it was also the home of i3 at one point, but I can't find it in the history, so maybe I'm mistaken about that. I also thought all 3 were started by the same author, but I'm not so sure anymore. EDIT: It was different people. Anselm R. Garbe started wmi and wmii, Michael Stapelberg started i3.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090315090203/http://wmi.suckle...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090315090203/http://wmii.suckl...

tfolbrecht• 6 years ago

You’re probably thinking of dwm. Another great tiling window manager.

LukeShu8• 6 years ago

If i3 is descended from wmii, that's news to me.

wmii moved to Google Code[1] before becoming abandonware before Google Code shut down.

Nevertheless, I continue to use wmii as my daily driver (as it has been for just a few months shy of 10 years), but it's really starting to wear on me that bugs won't be fixed unless I fix them[2], which I no longer have the gumption to do.

[1] https://code.google.com/archive/p/wmii/

[2] https://code.google.com/archive/p/wmii/issues/270 (when Google Code archived, a lot of users got weirdly anonymized? "Swift Bird" is me, apparently?)

jolmg5• 6 years ago

If i3 is descended from wmii, that's news to me.

I meant as heavily inspired by it, not as based on the same code. From https://i3wm.org/:

Based upon the experiences we made when wanting to hack/fix wmii, we agreed upon the following goals for i3...

Also, from the manpage i3(1):

i3 was created because wmii, our favorite window manager at the time, didn’t provide some features we wanted (multi-monitor done right, for example), had some bugs, didn’t progress since quite some time and wasn’t easy to hack at all (source code comments/documentation completely lacking). Still, we think the wmii developers and contributors did a great job. Thank you for inspiring us to create i3.
wmii moved to Google Code[1] before becoming abandonware before Google Code shut down.

Both wmi's and wmii's code can also still be obtained at https://dl.suckless.org/. Those are packages, though. It's great that the repo for wmii is still available. Thanks for those links.

nebula32• 6 years ago

If you did switch away from wmii, what window manager would you switch to? I’m in the same situation where after using wmii for so long none of the other tiling window managers feel right.

zamalek3• 6 years ago

It boggles the mind that developers, who believe that software should be minimal and do one thing well, attach toxic political agendas to their software[1] for no good reason. From a pragmatic standpoint Nazism (and all forms of racism) is pointless expenditure of mental resources and over-complicates life in general; which seems to conflict pretty strongly with their claimed ethos for software.

[1] https://twitter.com/kuschku/status/1156488420413362177

eznzt2• 6 years ago

Ever heard of codes of conduct?

zamalek3• 6 years ago

Sure, but I'm referring to a developer community who specifically aims to create "software that does one thing and one thing only." Having a political agenda is doing another thing.

paedubucher5• 6 years ago

I smirked a bit when I saw that picture, because the camo trousers and the bald heads look a bit edgy in that context. But hiking with torches is nothing strange here, at least not in Switzerland. We often do this in the winter, for example when walking to a Christmas dinner together with all the employees from the company.

zamalek3• 6 years ago

Is calling a mail server "Wolfsschanze" also common in Switzerland?

nix237• 6 years ago

But hiking with torches is nothing strange here, at least not in Switzerland.

Yes true, and half of the males have the Springerstiefel (from the militaryservice) on, because they have no other watertight shoes at home.

monopoledance• 6 years ago

In Germany this has a very clear Gschmäckle and is not a common activity. Unless you are a Nazi. Then it's all about Fackelmärsche, of course.

I want to add, for context, because I understand when Americans don't understand this: These types of "jokes" don't fly _culturally _in _Germany. If you glorify national socialism or the holocaust, even in humor, you are likely pretty close to that mindset anyway. It's really no joking matter here. And the suckless group _really plays with the local neonazi image... it's at most 90% joke.

LukeShu8• 6 years ago

the camo trousers and the bald heads look a bit edgy in that context.

FWIW, from another picture of that event, camo-trousers-guy looks like he's male-pattern-baldness-bald, not shaved-head-bald https://suckless.org/conferences/2017/slcon2017.png

Only one fellow appears to have a shaved head.

vlovich123• 6 years ago

The “do one thing and do it well ethos” is a UNIX academic philosophy, specifically around command line tools. Most software neither write code like that nor necessarily ascribe to such a philosophy.

I can both hate the ideology and accept the software as having utility for me (not that I think I’ve used any of it, but in principle I have no problem with people being fascinated by TempleOS even though I am against a lot of the things the author has stated he stands for).

paedubucher5• 6 years ago

Please also consider looking at the other picture of the same conference: https://suckless.org/conferences/2017/

"But Hitler also started his movement in the Bierkeller!!!1" ;-)

bitwize3• 6 years ago

Actually it makes perfect sense.

In order to truly democratize access to computers, you must meet your users where they are. That means you have to put in a lot of hard work and abandon your academic elitist norms of "elegance" in favor of empathy. The real world is messy, your users have messy minds, so your software is going to be accordingly complex and messy. Embrace this. Your users will be better off for it.

Empathy is inimical to the Unix philosophy. "Do one thing and do it well" forces the user to cobble solutions together out of the tools they have lying around, and not all of them can do this. This causes stress. The empathetic programmer seeks to minimize stress by putting everything the user may wish to do within their reach, the unempathetic programmer just doesn't care. If you can't understand the system on its own terms, well, sucks to be you. This creates a hierarchy of haves and have-nots: power users, hackers, and the l33t who can engage with the system on its own terms, and "lusers" who cannot engage with it meaningfully at all, which suits the power users just fine -- that's the endgame of Unix-philosophy fundamentalism.

Nazism and fascism are political philosophies embraced by unempathetic people, so it's no surprise when a bunch of empathy-deficient Unix-philosophy hardliners also turn out to be Nazis.

arp2429• 6 years ago

Congratulations, you've made the most ridiculous comment I've ever seen on HN. I can't stop laughing.

The only lack of empathy I see here is a failure in understanding that not everyone uses computers in the same way as you prefer. That's okay, we're all different. You can do your thing and what works for you, and I'll do mine and what works for me.

Signed.

One of those unempathetic Unix types and Nazi.

throwawaygulf• 6 years ago

This is hilarious copypasta; it's truly a perfect example of Poe's Law!

erik_seaberg• 6 years ago

putting everything the user may wish to do within their reach

Your users are human, so you can’t predict everything all of us will do. This is why we want hackable tools to reassemble, rather than sealed appliances.

asciimov• 6 years ago

I've been using both dwm and dmenu for about a year now. I enjoy them as they do their thing and get out of the way.

boogies3• 6 years ago

Same, plus st, which doesn’t even do tmux’s (or their tool scroll¹’s) scrollback thing and get a scrollbar or extraneous scrolling key bindings in the way (unless you apply the scrollback patch²).

¹https://git.suckless.org/scroll/file/README.html ²https://st.suckless.org/patches/scrollback/

paedubucher5• 6 years ago

I've been using dwm since 2010 and and still don't consider changing that. I use st at home (qterminal at work). dwm in combination with dmenu, slstatus, and slock runs fast on every machine with minimal resources and doesn't waste a pixel of your screen.

stevefolta• 6 years ago

I switched to dwm a couple of weeks ago after using Ratpoison for years and years, and I'm super happy with it. It solves the things that bugged me about Ratpoison. The one feature I was missing was very easy to add myself (the equivalent of "set padding" in monocle mode).

MisterTea2• 6 years ago

https://harmful.neocities.org/

rectang5• 6 years ago

This appears to an insider rant against suckless. It starts off like so:

clearing some things up re: cat-v
[context: this was produced for a particular community. if this doesnt mean anything to you, dont worry]
i am not within cat-v, i.e. “one of them” or a particular friend of anyone within it, but it was quite formative for me (on the technical side) from when i was about 14 years old, and i would like to provide the requisite context to view the whole ordeal charitably, and clear up some misconceptions suckless
first of all, suckless are shitheels. fuck em six ways to sunday.

snarfy2• 6 years ago

A good friend introduced me to suckless many years ago. he tried contributing but was shut down at ever turn. They are a very closed group.

raspyberr2• 6 years ago

For that to be meaningful, you'd really need to show what your friends was doing.

jd32• 6 years ago

(not the OP of that site, but here are my 2¢)

I started really getting into computers and open source software around 2010/2011 and cat-v (I was first introduced to golang through uriel pereira's[0] proselytization) and suckless were both a pretty big inspiration to me at the time.

I used dwm/st for years, but have since transitioned back to using ctwm/xterm as I find them more approachable and easier to use/extend. xterm may be "bloated and unmaintainable" according to the suckless community[1], but it has low latency, a pretty simple config, solid UTF-8 support, and is installed by default in most X11 environments that I use (I need to bounce around Windows/macOS/*bsd a lot).

Personally, I think the biggest problem is that there is definitely a bit of ego involved in these respective communities. When I tried participating back in ~2011, rather than realizing I was an impressionable high schooler/teenage kid who could use a solid mentor to guide them through the fundamentals of X11/C/go/etc, I was instead basically laughed out of the irc channel which led me to never participate in their community again and instead just learn/work on projects on my own.

I am still aesthetically interested in a lot of the cat-v/suckless software, but the politics/drama/exclusivity/negativity of it all (particularly in the early 2010s) steered me away from ever really participating in their respective communities.

I am also less interested in tooling/ui/customization than I was back then, so I basically just tend to use whatever program gets the job done rather than obsessing over theory/purity/minimalism. I don't have a problem with those who do care about these things (I am not trying to criticize suckless as they do do a lot of great work), it's just no longer something I think about as much.

[0] http://uriel.cat-v.org/

[1] https://st.suckless.org/

http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/sites/berlinblue/

arp2429• 6 years ago

I was an impressionable high schooler/teenage kid who could use a solid mentor to guide them through the fundamentals of X11/C/go/etc, I was instead basically laughed out of the irc channel

I think people there can definitely be jerks sometimes, and I don't really like the negativity either.

But on the other hand, not every place and community on the internet needs to be welcoming to teenagers and mentor them through the fundamentals of X11/C/Go.

I just wish people were a bit less of a jerk about it. Then again, I have said this nicely to people a few times over the years ("hey, cool you're interested, but note this is really intended for expert users"), and it's about a 50/50 toss-up about whether or not you'll get insults and an aggressive reply back. One time this guy got so triggered over this that he went to several subs to tell everyone what a horrible person I was just for (nicely!) explaining that they didn't really seem to be the intended target audience.

Turns out that being a programmer means you're obliged to help strangers out on the internet, according to some anyway *shrug*.

I basically just tend to use whatever program gets the job done rather than obsessing over theory/purity/minimalism

That's pretty much why I use dwm; I use a hacked-up version and I somehow managed to lose the source code for that 2 years ago (not sure how...) but it's okay, because it Just Works™. It's very stable, never changes, and I never need to look at it or worry that an update will break anything or will move things around ("now where did that button go?!")

For me, suckless is very much a pragmatical thing, not a "minimalist ideological" thing.

MisterTea2• 6 years ago

cat-v is full of good people these days. I'm more of a recent lurker there and I have had good interactions so far. Of course some are terse/inquisitive/contrary but never mean or nasty. Blunt perhaps? Nothing that ever bothered me.

Hell, today some trolls sent some poor schmuck to cat-v to ask about debugging linux kernel code because its an cantankerous plan 9 channel; Right? Instead, they actually received a little help (and a humorous sarcastic remark or two...) from some very knowledgeable people. Ironically, Instead of being run off with so called cat-v torches and pitchforks, they were helped and went on their way. Maybe they'll see the light and come back one day.

musicale• 6 years ago

they are cargo-cult idiots who do things like unironically create a linux distribution with static linking as a design goal and namesake

I've always wondered at the docker images that a) include their own shared libraries and b) typically only run a single process. Seems like static linking would be fine.

kdtsh• 6 years ago

This is really a relief. I knew the two communities existed on a similar kind of plane, and was worried that cat-v and by extension 9front were just as bad as suckless. But I did not know how to interpret the connection between cat-v and 9front after finding out they were safe with that crossed-out swastika ... glad to hear that the harmful section of the website is effectively just dated.

jonatron• 6 years ago

Slock is the only one I use, but it's great.

imiric2• 6 years ago

Great tools and philosophy on software. I think their political views and whatever online drama they're involved in is hardly relevant to my enjoyment of their software.

st is my favorite terminal and surf my favorite web browser. It does take some effort to add the features you need and to keep them updated, but once everything is in place they're a joy to use.

The development on surf has stagnated in recent years, a few sites are unusable for me and the performance is terrible compared to mainstream browsers, but the simplicity and customization more than make up for it.

surf would make a great base to build a simple browser for the masses, if a competent C developer would polish some of these issues and added a more user friendly UI, while still staying true to the suckless philosophy. But so far unfortunately I haven't seen a particular fork pick up steam.

boogies3• 6 years ago

a simple browser for the masses [with] more user friendly UI

I think you mean GNOME Web/Epiphany. They both use libwebkit2gtk (https://webkitgtk.org/) as a base (as does luakit, a fairly simple and customizable browser that I’ll probably switch to if/when Palemoon breaks Pentadactyl).

imiric2• 6 years ago

I've tried Epiphany, but it's still too bloated for my preferences, not customizable enough and I'd like to keep GNOME packages out of my system. :)

Luakit is more to my liking, and I think I gave it a try a few years ago but can't remember what put me off about it. At first glance it has features I don't need like adblocking (I use a DNS blocker on my router) and tabs, but it's promising. I'll give it another try, thanks.

I've also tried a few of these libwebkitgtk wrappers like qutebrowser, dwb, lariza, uzbl, etc. but they all had some drawbacks compared to surf.

And I can't say I trust the Palemoon or Waterfox developers to maintain a Firefox fork. It's a gargantuan job, which is why I prefer the relative simplicity of the WebKit wrappers. Ideally I'd like to switch to a simpler rendering engine as well, but sadly the modern web is built with WebKit compatibility in mind.

MayeulC• 6 years ago

I quite like suckless software, unfortunately it is very X-centric.

Not sure what their view on Wayland is?

hnlmorg• 6 years ago

There's a lot of CLI tools in suckless too. I quite like their IRC client https://tools.suckless.org/ii/

spijdar3• 6 years ago

I can't speak for the group, but my guess is in practice they would dislike the Wayland ecosystem. A cursory google seems to show this too.

A lot of their tooling and favored software works by being as minimal as possible while doing its one primary purpose well. They dislike monoliths like systemd, pulseaudio, networkmanager etc. which do many tasks. The wayland protocol itself is fairly minimalist, which they seem to like, but to practically use it you end up requiring a monolith compositor/window server.

Further, Wayland fundamentally doesn't support running e.g. in a non-compositing mode, and requires more cruft to draw to the screen vs just using xlib.

At the end of the day, all the functionality that Xorg provided has to be served by something. And when you're not using one of the big boy software stacks like Gnome or KDE, that means re-implementing the wheel, or copying from another project like wlroots. I suspect they prefer the status quo in that Xorg is at least proven and fairly battle hardened software.

Just idly guessing, though.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 6 years ago

It kinda cuts both ways, I suspect. Xorg is itself a huge monolithic mess, but it takes all the messy bits into itself and lets you extend it with nice small programs (ex. window managers, screenshot programs, keybinding programs, whatever). Wayland is in some ways actually better because it removes the massive central mess that is the X server... but then forces every other component to deal with those things, and does so in ways that to date play badly with composability in the software (ex. now a "window manager" is a compositor and must do most of what the X server did before, and you can't factor out things like screen capture because that functionality is restricted).

majewsky• 6 years ago

The wlroots/Sway teams are leading the way towards a more Unix-y Wayland experience, though. Over the last two years or so, a lot of 1:1 replacements for those "do one thing and do it well" X11 tools have appeared: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide#commo...

grep_name• 6 years ago

monoliths like systemd, pulseaudio, networkmanager etc

This is the first time I've seen networkmanager in that list. What's the alternative way of handling network connectivity? nmtui seemed pretty one-function to me

Barrin922• 6 years ago

the strange nazism aside which is bad enough I honestly think their programming philosophy sucks.

Why is it sensible to configure a software in C and having to recompile it every time I make a change? Patching software through diffs is error prone and you basically have to fiddle around with the order as to not accidentally mess up your entire program, it makes the software basically non-extensible in a sane way because there's no interface between extension and core code. The line number limits on code also incentivize spaghetti code. If you want software that sucks less you don't need fewer line numbers, you need good program structure and design.

raspyberr2• 6 years ago

Well stuff like dwm and st should get reconfigured rarely so this doesn't matter. And it recompiles blazingly fast anyway.

flukus3• 6 years ago

Yep, my dwm re-compiles, installs and restarts faster than a theme change in gnome.

_fq4v2• 6 years ago

Nazism?

recursive4• 6 years ago

Elsewhere in the thread, it's noted that they maintain a mail server that's named after some nazi stronghold or something.

Rotten194• 6 years ago

I think they're referring to this?: https://twitter.com/kuschku/status/1156488420413362177

disclaimer: found on Google, unsure of context / if these people are core developers, just sharing for those who like me were also confused

zarkov99• 6 years ago

You know, one day we might see real Nazis but we won’t have a word for them anymore.

boogies3• 6 years ago

Strange arguable libel aside, you don’t have to compile your wm or terminal every time you make a change. There are awesomewm (and echinus and spectrwm and Qtile et al.), and xterm and GNOME Terminal and guake and konsole and xfce terminal and Terminator and Terminology and Tilda and Yakuake and rxvt et al., many al.: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications/Ut....

Setting all those aside, you can configure any decent text editor to run `make` whenever you save, and I dare you to find any combination of patches for any single suckless software (except surf) that takes more than 1000 milliseconds to compile with tcc on a computer you use on a regular basis (should work for any normal desk/laptop from the past decade or two).

Spivak• 6 years ago

Yeah, I'm not really sure if DRYing yourself to death is a good approach to software development. Ansible is really really easy to hack on and it's ~1.2mil LOC which probably horrifies the suckless devs.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 6 years ago

I suspect a good deal of that 1.2M lines is in modules, isn't it? Rather like how people remark on how many lines are in Linux and overlook that it's overwhelmingly in drivers and the actual core system is much smaller.

alex_smart• 6 years ago

Have you even taken a look at their source code? I have read plenty of open source projects and suckless's code is about as unspaghettilike as it gets. I find their approach to programming a beautiful contrast to the piles of garbage upon other piles of garbage style over-engineered approach I have seen elsewhere.

drhastings• 6 years ago

Have you tried it?

I've not experienced any of those problems while using dwm for the past several years.

Where I wasn't able to find an existing diff supporting my desired customizations I found the code easy to understand and extend myself.

Find me some spaghetti code in the codebase and your point might be a little more convincing to me.

passivate• 6 years ago

I think you're pointing out procedural issues, but ultimately the proof is in the pudding. If what they're doing works for them, then its pretty hard to convince them otherwise. It would be easier to make your case if you could point out specifics.

_fq4v2• 6 years ago

Runit is amazing, and a great replacement for standard init on embedded systems

arp2429• 6 years ago

Yes, but it's not part of suckless.

tathougies2• 6 years ago

Uh... I always thought it was! You're right though. It shares the philosophy though.

nrclark• 6 years ago

For the record, runit's code is in really bad shape.

It uses deprecated APIs, and also hasn't been updated from K&R C. There are a number of type warnings on 64-bit systems. The build system cannot be used for cross-compilation, and compiling/installing it is a disaster kind of generally.

Runit's licensing is all over the place, and its documentation is incomplete/inaccurate. It's been abandoned by its creator, as near as I can tell. I tried to get in touch with him a couple of years ago to offer some fixes, and got radio silence. There is no apparent way to contribute code to the project.

I've never used the busybox version, and so I can't speak to that one. But upstream runit has been a dead project for years, and badly needs to be forked by the distros that use it.

jezze• 6 years ago

I see a lot of people here complain about their toxic community. This was always the worst thing about suckless and it put a lot of people off about trying to engage and help out, including me. Luckily the most toxic of them all left a few years ago now and the mailing list is now a lot better compared to how it used to be. I'm not on irc anymore so dont know about the conversations happening there but I hope it also has become better. Its interesting how one persons bad influence can throw shade on an entire community. Most of them are really nice.

centimeter3• 6 years ago

Creating good software inherently involves some form of exclusion; you need a strategy to exclude bad software. There are fundamentally two families of exclusion strategies that can be used: formal and informal. Formal exclusion is when you exclude bad software through formal constructions, like proof systems. This works great but is expensive. Informal exclusion is when you exclude bad software through social pressure. This works well and is cheap. Any organization that successfully leverages informal exclusion will inevitably be perceived as "toxic" in the modern jargon. If you've been in open source for a while I'm sure you can think of some examples.

lfam• 6 years ago

It's possible to maintain software quality (or quality of any endeavour) without being rude or making people feel bad.

On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between rude behaviour and high levels of technical quality, nor is there any plausible explanation for such a correlation.

My hunch is that any successful project with a rude atmosphere succeeds in spite of the rudeness.

rektide2• 6 years ago

The premise itself seems as mainstream as it comes: aggrieved and upset at the world. At least these people were/are trying to forge a better path, but to me, it mostly just seems like "the same thing but a bit smaller this time". The overall experience? Fairly close. A little better.

There was some cool 9p roots that were genuinely distinct, but it didn't seem to really take hold strongly across the community.

But yeah, there were allegedly some un-good community members too, and I'd fully believe the community itself has improved a lot.

nerdponx2• 6 years ago

It's not just the toxic community. It's also the fact that their opinion of what "sucks less" is quite particular and not shared by many people.

Instead of acknowledging that they're engaged in an interesting, unusual, and important experiment, they just say that everything else sucks. The whole premise of the existence of the group is more or less that most software is written by and for inept rubes.

On the other hand, maybe their exclusionary attitude is what helps keep the interesting, unusual, and important experiment alive. I know a lot of people who really enjoy using dwm, st, dmenu, surf, etc. They are indeed good, non-sucky programs, if you don't mind writing some light-duty C code and recompiling to update your config. Who am I to judge? But you have to acknowledge that this is a very unusual definition of "sucking less".

alpaca128• 6 years ago

The premise of their project is something I fully agree with, but I always found it a bit too extreme and opinionated. It's one thing to avoid unnecessary bloat. But going for short code at any cost doesn't seem to be the ideal solution either; now we've got over 100 patches for dwm, created based on the untouched source code of some specific dwm version. The result is a bit of a mess, only worsened by the source code containing almost exclusively 1-2 letter variable names.

Nonetheless I like most suckless projects, especially st and dmenu are fantastic. Even though the push against bloat is more needed on the internet. I'm tired of all the tracking, loading times and memory usage, despite ad blockers.

jhallenworld• 6 years ago

I recently found out about them for "tabbed" (in the tools project)- converts xterm into a tabbed terminal emulator.

leephillips• 6 years ago

I love their software and their attitude.

I’ve been using dwm for years and it’s the perfect window manager. Configuration by editing the header and recompiling makes sense when compilation takes under a second.

I’m not much of a C programmer, but I like that I can sort of understand their code. A window manager in 2000 lines means that if I wanted to I could understand how the whole thing works.

It’s all refreshing, and even, I would say, beautiful. I like that my environment uses very little memory, leaving my ram for actually doing things.

cptnapalm• 6 years ago

I tried running st on sparc64/OpenBSD. It compiled fine, but would instantly crash when run. I'm guessing it is an endian problem.

dang• 6 years ago

If curious see also

2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016823

2008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=279925

also this from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10565605

Software That Sucks Less

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