Retrying the st Terminal Emulator

Way back when I lacked the tuits to recompile st. So after a bout of tuitism and maybe less sleep than normal a custom compiled version of st is installed. (I'll probably forget by the time OpenBSD 7.5 rolls around and then wonder why the terminals do not start.) Some highlights:

enabled the OpenBSD compile flags (duh)

applied "blink the cursor" patch. I have trouble tracking the cursor otherwise.

applied "hide the mouse pointer on typing" patch

removed support for mouse buttons so accidental trackpad interactions do not inject ^Y or paste text

the monitor on this laptop has too high a resolution, so the default font got upped to Hack:pixelsize=22

changed CLIPBOARD to PRIMARY everywhere so that copy and paste works as expected

added lots of characters to the *worddelimiters list to make double-click not grab too much

made st-mono the default TERM, but programs can and do ignore this and will instead spray color codes, so

gutted tsetattr to remove support for colors and various other attributes. xterm(1) at least has the knob xterm*colorMode:false

oh and made the cursor red so it's a bit easier to spot

st-nocolor.patch

I may add faint and invisible back in, or maybe not. Underline is required because that's how w3m shows links, and reverse is used by various things like irssi, less, and mutt. Pretty invisible from years of use until you compile it out.

A knob here is something that can be changed via a preferences file, command line option, or similar, as opposed to having to recompile the whole thing. Opinions vary here. Some developers are anti-knob (see: suckless), while others who hold to "there is no bloat" will see fit to add an infinity of knobs (see: the modern web). A pro-knob argument runs along the lines of "customers will only use some percent of the features, so we need to have all the knobs to support more customers" while the other side may run with "you ain't gonna need it", or will point out that the knobful software is a bloated monstrosity that only runs okayishly on very modern CPUs. Most probably fall somewhere between these extremes, or elsewhere.

/tech/openbsd/four-terminals-and-mupdf.png

Knobs have their place; they are rather fun to twiddle on a real synthesizer sensibly designed. Logic.app meanwhile sometimes annoyed the heck out of me due to excessive amounts of clicking to get some things done where a sed on a config file would have been much faster.

Speaking of knobs, the following for ~/.Xdefaults makes urxvt behave better with regard to copy and paste. I do keep fancy terminals around for when something needs colors. This would be silly games, or at some previous job a nvidia GPU installer required a terminal that supported colors. (Amfora took some patching to make it work better in a 1-bit color environment, and probably needs some more work.)

tags #st #terminal #urxvt

P.S. when did github break showing files? The "Skip to content" link now goes to a "{{ message }}" line. At least you can still clone repos without javascript?