Re: [dev] st lack of scrollback

From: Britton Kerin <britton.kerin_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2016 14:20:16 -0800

On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 10:57 PM, Martin Kühne <mysatyre_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 8:39 AM, Britton Kerin <britton.kerin_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The point is it's *much* easier for you to do it. You know how terminal
>> programming works already, I don't. I *could* do it, but it would be extremely
>> inefficient.
>>
>
> I don't know how the current patch implements scrollback and I'm not
> sure how I would go about to improve it. The specifics would require
> me to open a source file and a patch and make sense of what either of
> these things do and how they work together. It's not hard per se to me
> because I did it a few times, but I did it a few times because I
> wanted to risk being extremely inefficient and having an interesting
> experience in having my mind boggled.
>
>> You say use dvtm.
>
> Under utter disregard wrt source line count and feature bloat I use tmux.
>
>> The st scrollback patches together are maybe 100
>> lines.
>
> So, you're counting lines? By the start of the 21st century's
> standards, you're half way into reading code already. Why not go all
> the way?

I was counting them because that's the usual justification for not
having a feature in suckless-land. Personally I think it's a fairly poor
measure for what you actually want, which is the much harder to
define as-small-as-possible-while-being-complete-in-some-sense.
My claim is that however you define that for terminal emulators,
scrollback is unquestionably in there.

>> don't kid yourself that it's a generally good approach for most users.
>
> Indeed. These things aren't a good approach for most users. I see
> suckless software as an academic collection of projects, MINIX comes
> to mind, which are reasonable in size and fit for a general example in
> their approach. However, of course you can't adjust everything super
> dynamically like on a KDE desktop, but that's already covered by the
> above premise. Making sense of it is, as we now have established, less
> work than in the usual case, which only brings me back to my point:
> Why aren't you going all the way?

Well I'm still using st, so I'll put it on my list, but my list is long and lack
of scrollback only makes me scream maybe a few times a week.

Britton
Received on Wed Aug 31 2016 - 00:20:16 CEST