Re: [dev] [st] goals / non-goals for st?

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Anselm R Garbe<garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/8/22 Ray Kohler <ataraxia937_AT_gmail.com>:
>> I'm rather curious on where st will go, and what kinds of things other
>> terminals do that it will or won't do.
>
> Well my plan is to achieve *good* xterm compliance and 256 color
> support. As you know xterm is not really fully vt100 or vt220
> compliant, so that's also not a goal of st. Rather other features like
> the integration of filters that can listen to the terminal output and
> do certain things like changing the background color, to experiment
> with some ideas like having different colors depending on the
> directory/host you are in, or the planned st server that keeps
> terminal sessions survive X shutdowns.

I love the server idea. I'm using urxvtd now, and it's already very
nice. A persistent server like you propose is something I never even
thought of.

>> In particular:
>> - Is a scrollback buffer objectionable in principle, such that we
>> should expect to "just use GNU screen"?
>
> Yes, though there must be an upper limit configurable, where 0 means
> no limit, or until the process can't increase the buffer using
> malloc() anymore...

Unlimited scrollback is one of the few things I miss from my OS X
days. (Of course, the Mac Terminal's scrollback is rather broken, so I
don't miss it that much...)

In general, you're making st sound much more interesting than I hoped
it would be. I was expecting an ultra-bare-bones terminal - something
like the terminal equivalent of surf. An ultra-smart terminal is even
better :)
Received on Sun Aug 23 2009 - 23:32:43 UTC