Re: [dev] [st] 0.2 is out

From: Benjamin R. Haskell <suckless_AT_benizi.com>
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2012 09:39:55 -0500 (EST)

On Wed, 8 Feb 2012, ilf wrote:

> On 02-08 00:14, Aurélien Aptel wrote:
>> As I said previously somewhere on the list, I've tagged the last
>> changeset of the default branch as 0.2.
>
> Checking it out for the first time since 0.1.1.
>
> I am running the same tmux session in both rxvt-unicode and st next to each
> other. The drawing speed of st does indeed feel better than before, but it's
> still way slower than rxvt in everything I have tried. This is one of the
> issues still holding me back from switching to st as my main terminal
> emulator. Do other terms have magic in their rendering code for extra speed?

rxvt-unicode uses the wonderful optimization of not really caring
whether everything gets displayed. As a test, simulate some command
that produces output that can't actually be read -- like from a noisy
makefile, the non-error output of TeX, or an accidental `find`:

find / | sed 10000q > ~/find10000
time cat ~/find10000

uxterm takes 2.6 seconds to display text I can't possibly read.
urxvt finishes instantly, only taking 0.04 seconds of wall time.
st takes 50.1 seconds.

Obviously, this isn't the primary use case for a terminal emulator. But
in a term with scrollback, sometimes it's quicker to just dump the data
and scroll back up to the part you care about. And if the interesting
portion is the tail, all the better if it finishes instantly.


> Second thing to notice is the font height. st displays six more lines
> than rxvt, with tmux padding them. I changed $FONT in config.h:
>
> -#define FONT "-*-*-medium-r-*-*-*-120-75-75-*-60-*-*"
> +#define FONT "-*-terminus-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
>
> But it has no effect. Where do I change this?

I used:
#define FONT "-*-terminus-medium-r-*-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"

If you're on the 'xft' branch, you'll need a different format, e.g.:

#define XFT_FONT "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-13"

-- 
Best,
Ben
Received on Wed Feb 08 2012 - 15:39:55 CET

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