Re: [dev] [dwm] [dmenu] The Xft situation

From: Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2015 20:27:14 +0100

Hi FRIGN,

On 4 March 2015 at 19:57, FRIGN <dev_AT_frign.de> wrote:
> for quite a while now, dwm and dmenu have had patches to add
> Xft-support to them. There has been no version for current
> git-checkouts and a considerate noise here on the mailing
> list about people having trouble setting up fonts in dwm and
> dmenu. I personally hate noise.
> The initial motivation for these patches was to allow maximum
> portability, but given st already depends on fontconfig, we
> might as well convert dwm and dmenu as well.
> This has the following advantages:
>
> 1) Xft is already imported by st
> 2) People prefer Xft configuration over XLFD
> 3) Using fontconfig it drops LOC considerably
> 4) Less noise on the mailing list, helping us focus on more
> important stuff
>
> As an alternative, already made patches reverting Xft-additions
> in dwm and dmenu are going to be added to the patches section,
> so people wishing to port dwm and dmenu to obscure platforms
> without fontconfig are not having trouble while the majority
> of users will have an easier time setting up dwm and dmenu
> harmoniously with st.
>
> Let me know what you think.

I'm not opposed in switching fully to Xft. Xfonts are a mess as well.

Though I'd really like to base st/dwm/dmenu on libsl/drw.c

Point is dmenu/dwm are easy ones, problem is st, which uses quite
sophisticated font/glyph handling.

With this, dmenu/dwm/st would not directly depend on Xft/fontconfig,
but on drw only. Then it depends on the drw-implementation what it
uses internally. The drw-interface must expose something
Xft-independent of course in order to achieve this.

BR,
Anselm
Received on Wed Mar 04 2015 - 20:27:14 CET