Dave Blanchard rants: > > Hello all, > > I see too many people wasting time with this piece of junk st "emulator", whi > ch sucks on so many levels. "A complete lack of features" and "terminal emula > tor" simply don't mix. Please quit with this garbage.
All software sucks. Witness the POS email client I'm using which can't even split paragraphs on word boundaries. We use it anyway. > rxvt-unicode is a thousand times better, and is super light weight. With daem > on mode it starts instantly--approx 1 ms from start to ready for input, on my > 10 year old desktop. It is essentially feature complete for any practical pu > rpose. So what is there to gain with using some half ass junk like st? For all practical purposes, all non-GUI software (terminal emulators, unless they're based on libvte, would be considered a grey area that counts mostly as non-GUI as long as you don't look too hard) starts in milliseconds. I just checked and the amount of time it takes me to tell the computer that st is the program I want to start is several orders of magnitude larger than the time it takes to start after I hit the enter key. > Terminal emulation is a solved problem. Why reinvent the wheel? Wheels are reinvented constantly. Does your car run on rolling logs with a team of people picking up the log that's been spat out the back who rush it around to the front? > Attached here is patches and build script and patches for rxvt-unicode 931. > (Find the tarball yourself.) Put all the files together in the same directory > and run the script, after inspecting everything carefully of course. > > Imagine if you can, the bliss of never, ever having to worry about terminal e > mulation problems again. Imagine finally being able to move on to new and big > ger problems, 50+ years later. The mind reels. The real question here is, why have you wrapped your ego so tightly around a particular variant of rxvt? If someone wants to use st, or wants to adapt it to their own needs and is discussing how to do that, why does that bother you? Show us on the doll where the bad terminal emulator touched you. I'm writing my own terminal emulator from scratch (well ... not entirely; I started by cribbing off st because its implementation is straightforward and simple but we have long since parted ways). Not because it's useful or because none of the existing terminal emulators fulfill my needs (they do, and are sometimes handy for testing or for comparing sources), but because it's fun. (Yes I find poring over standards documents fun*; sue me) Maybe you should try having some of that some time? Matthew [*] ECMA 48 (and its ISO equivalent, I'm sure) defines a mode named "BDSM" which means Bi-Directional Support Mode and I am 100% certain the word "Support" was put in there deliberately.
