And now in my late twenties, suckless terminal is the only one that would work reliably on a shitty old enterprise linux system at work. Yeah, we got xterm and konsole (the older one). I am seeing them in a whole different light now. I did not read the source code now and it is effectively a foreign language to me, but just being able to have modern features in it without too many dependencies is a different level of bliss. This time, I am glad I have the flexi patch to the rescue since, i passed on suckless terminal as a real alternative since I don’t want to patch it manually or solve merge conflicts!
Even though I don’t like the elitist attitude of the project, can’t deny they got a point. Why does a terminal emulator need to be so complicated!
I wonder, is this really such a big problem? How often do people add patches or change their config?
I've configured my st once and haven't touched that build for years. I use only few patches like scrollback, custom colortheme and a "plumb" for few scripts.
I've also had an opportunity recently, to try a "modern" and trendy terminal and I can't see myself switching to something slower (in terms of lag) and using 10x more memory and cpu even when idle for literally zero gain.
I almost want to set up a VM that sets up XDG_CONFIG_HOME as ~/.foobar and see how many apps actually respect it, and how many still write to ~/.config.
Interfacing with people is never easy.
export CONFIG_DIR="${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"
export CACHE_DIR="${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}"
...
XDG_*_DIRS are a bit more complicated, but nothing that can't be solved with a simple for-loop in any modern programming language.