For quite a while I was using alacritty, but I eventually got annoyed about it because I was not really in the target demographic:
- I use computers with low power GPUs, so even opening multiple alacritty instances would cause freezing and visual lag
- I got tired of trying to keep up with their configuration changes over time
- East-Asian characters always had some various problems through the years, that I mostly tried to ignore
- Extra features like "vim keybindings" didn't really make sense for me as I do my main work in tmux sessions
So my friend Jonas asked me why I even bothered using alacritty anymore. He suggested instead that I should try his st terminal setup.
st works by simply having contributors publish their patches on some version of st to add functionality.
I do not really have an opinion on this if this is good or bad.
The Nixpkgs st derivation does most of the plumbing for you, so all you need to do is provide the diffs that you want to apply.
{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> { } }:
pkgs.st.overrideAttrs (old: {
patches = old.patches ++ [
(builtins.fetchurl {
url = "https://st.suckless.org/patches/scrollback/st-scrollback-0.8.4.diff";
sha256 = "0i0fav13sxnsydpllny26139gnzai66222502cplh18iy5fir3j1";
})
./url.diff
./invert.diff
./term.diff
./solarized-accented.diff
./font.diff
./shortcuts.diff
];
})The most obvious problem I have with this is that diffs don't merge very well. The most common problem being that any changes to the shortcuts variable in config.def.h will cause conflicts.
If you choose to manage a git repo for your fork of st, then your process would be to fix merge conflicts. However, this doesn't work if you would actually like to manage a feature matrix, where you add and remove patches you use over time.
However, in this patches-driven method, I cannot see how I would work with this other than to download all the patches directly the modify them so that
- I would have to remove all changes to
shortcutsin the upstream patch I downloaded - I would have to consolidate all of the
shortcutschanges to a single diff
And so I have done like so:
diff --git a/config.def.h b/config.def.h
index 3eabc86..10f39ec 100644
--- a/config.def.h
+++ b/config.def.h
@@ -191,8 +191,10 @@ static Shortcut shortcuts[] = {
{ ControlMask, XK_Print, toggleprinter, {.i = 0} },
{ ShiftMask, XK_Print, printscreen, {.i = 0} },
{ XK_ANY_MOD, XK_Print, printsel, {.i = 0} },
- { TERMMOD, XK_Prior, zoom, {.f = +1} },
- { TERMMOD, XK_Next, zoom, {.f = -1} },
- { TERMMOD, XK_Home, zoomreset, {.f = 0} },
+ { ControlMask, XK_equal, zoom, {.f = +3} },
+ { ControlMask, XK_minus, zoom, {.f = -3} },
+ { ControlMask, XK_0, zoomreset, {.f = 0} }, // number zero
+ { TERMMOD, XK_O, copyurl, {.i = 0} }, // letter 'o'
+ { TERMMOD, XK_X, invert, { } },
{ TERMMOD, XK_C, clipcopy, {.i = 0} },
{ TERMMOD, XK_V, clippaste, {.i = 0} },
{ TERMMOD, XK_Y, selpaste, {.i = 0} },So this is what I'm stuck on, that it seems like there should be a better way to work with this, that I could convert all of these diffs into some proper patch format that I could then actually combine and convert back into a single diff.
Or maybe there is another way. I would like for someone to create their own example and show me how they think this should work.
This setup for st works quite well for me to get a terminal that basically does all the things I need it to do. But I do hope that someone has some ideas on how working with this could be improved in some way.