Re: [dev] [bugs] st clears up upon resize and other little things

From: Roberto E. Vargas Caballero <k0ga_AT_shike2.com>
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2016 13:09:47 +0100

Hi,

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 10:53:30AM -0200, Brad Luther wrote:
> 1 - when you open st and some strings printed (try 'ls' for example),
> upon resizing it down and resizing it back up, the content is lost.
> Shouldn't the printed stuff remain there? This is an annoyance for
> when I, for example, 'ls' a folder, open an image that I found inside
> so dwm automatically tile st and the image, and then I close the
> image. Now the st window will not show all the content of the folder
> from when I did 'ls'. The files/folders previously printed that upon
> resize were covered are now gone and I have to 'ls' again.

St resizes the line buffers each time that the geometry of the terminal
change, then the content of the space out of the new size is lost.
It is done by a design decision. In fact it is easier the another
behaviour and not resize anything and hungry memory that you are not
using. If you really want this behaviour you can get with any terminal
session manager (dvtm, tmux, screen ...).


> 2- st is the only program on dwm that doesn't cover the entire screen
> when opening it in fullscreen tile mode. There's always a line on the
> bottom of the screen to which st refuses to expand.

This kind of situations can happen because the geometry of st must be
a multiply of the size of your font. In the past there was some work
to avoid this situation adding pagging pixel lines, and it generated
a lot of problems. Keep it simple.

> 3- the delkey patch[0] isn't working for me. As I understand it should
> make 'Delete' erase the current the highlighted character, but it does
> nothing. All I did was clone the repo and apply the patch (which is
> simple enough). Are there any users successfully using this patch?
> What could I have done wrong?

No, the objective of that patch is to change the ascii value generated
when you press backspace and delete, because at this moment, for some
very stupid historic problems, the majority of terminals generate
a DEL when you press backspace, instead of generating a BACKSPACE.
All this stuff is really well explained in the FAQ. The problem you
are haaving is that you are using bad programs that don't follow the
POSIX standard. You should send a patch to them.

Terminal keyboard have two modes, keypad mode and ascii mode. When you
are in ascii mode the terminal generates the correct ASCII code which
will generate the function labelled in the key. In the case of St it
generates ^[P, which is the sequence that st understands to delete the
current character. When the keyboard is in keypad mode it generates
a sequence thought to be an unique identifier of the key. In the
terminfo definition of the terminals you can find which is the
sequence for every special key when they are in keypad mode, and it
means that a program that wants to check against these code must to
change the mode of the terminal to keypad before reading. There is a
terminfo definition to do this. Again everything is explain in the
FAQ.

You can try to fix the problems of the other programs, or write
a patch of st that make it to send the same key in both modes and
upload it to the wiki. I will not do it because is giving the reason
to the bad written programs, instead of fixing them. But if you want
to do it and upload it to the wiki we can put the link to the patch
in the FAQ.

Regards,
Received on Sun Jan 17 2016 - 13:09:47 CET