On 21/11/10 08:55, NRK wrote:
> I wouldn't say it's "critical need". And if we judge from that pov then
> one could ask, "What's the critical need for a dynamic window manger or
> minimal softwares in general?".
Terminal emulator's job is to allow terminal input/output. Latency is simply not
relevant, unless it is noticeable by a human (for example, if a simple "cat
/some/file" for a multi-line text file has a delay anywhere from 500 ms to a
second or two between the output of individual lines, when not dependant on
factors such as reading from a network of a faulty hard disk; that would just be
annoying, but still usable). st doesn't have such issues, so anyone experiencing
them should look for the cause elsewhere (Xft/fontconfig?).
Also, the need for "minimal software" is not comparable to the "need" for "low
latency" in a terminal emulator. The former is a fundamental concept, while the
latter is superficial.
> XTerm has many (visible) problems. Maybe I've misconfiuged it, but I
> cannot get it to fallback to other fonts reliably, and thus some glyphs
> don't render. It also chokes badly when it tries to render some unicode
> glyphs for the first time.
If you refer to color emoji or Nerd Font symbols, they are poorly supported in
X, and I'd even say they are bloat by themselves. But it is to be expected of
XTerm to have problems. To quote
https://st.suckless.org,
> xterm is bloated and unmaintainable. Here's an excerpt from the README:
>
> Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
>
> This is undoubtedly the most ugly program in the distribution. It was one
> of the first "serious" programs ported, and still has a lot of historical
> baggage. Ideally, there would be a general tty widget and then vt102 and
> tek4014 subwidgets so that they could be used in other programs. We are
> trying to clean things up as we go, but there is still a lot of work to
> do.
>
> Needless to say things have not changed, it's still ugly. It has over 65K
> lines of code and emulates obscure and obsolete terminals you will never need.
>
> The popular alternative, rxvt has only 32K lines of code. This is just too
> much for something as simple as a terminal emulator; it's yet another example
> of code complexity.
>
> Terminal emulation doesn't need to be so complex.
Received on Thu Nov 11 2021 - 17:31:15 CET