 Hello there, so at the beginning of this year I had done a video on ST the simple terminal and that was around the time I actually started using it after being recommended it hundreds of times by subscribers usually the recommendations I get from subscribers are terrible, but this one was good So I did a video on it but I wanted to do a little update because I've added I know a couple you guys use my build and a lot more I'll probably what might be interested so I wanted to do an update showcasing what ST can do Sort of why I use it and additional features that I've added to my build so Now ST now suckless utilities. We'll talk about them later You might know about them, but they're built to be minimalist They're built to have very few lines of code the code is supposed to be very readable So that even people who aren't big into You know or you don't really have to have a lot of program-specific knowledge to get in there and modify things and Although a lot of people think of suckless as being sort of I don't know leet Little hard to access and there's a truth to that. I've found that even though. I'm not really a programmer It's it's pretty easy to get into this program and since it's source-based Understand it now. Anyway, I'll get into all that in a second, but As I said, I've added a couple features. Here's my build of ST. It's on my github I am going to as an example just go ahead and clone it And install it just in case you don't know how to but I've added a couple features like the ability to read extra sources I've actually edited the documentation and the manual and stuff like that because people ask and Added some URL detection and stuff like that, but we'll go into that So just clone it and to install it just sudo make install it and There are some build requirements that you may not have well You'll probably have them but check the read me if you if you get some kind of error So anyway ST. I actually already had it installed. This is what it looks like, but this is what my build is Now why do I use ST first off? I will say originally I was using urx vt Which a lot of people use out there, but there are some things that urx vt is just terrible at one example out there is that urx vt is terrible and a lot of other terminals are just terrible at doing unicode ST does them perfectly well as you can see these emojis print out perfectly fine. I will say of course You do need an emoji font for this sometimes people ask me. Why doesn't it work on ST? Sometimes it's just because you don't have an emoji font I have in consolata That's a mono space font that has very good emoji coverage and well unicode coverage generally But so ST is very good at unicode characters. It's also pretty good at You know like ranger previews and stuff like that. So the images and stuff like this They're a lot more robust than they are on urx vt Now I will say there is the problem where I think if you yeah If you like mouse over to another window sometimes the image disappears But I find that in general the images are like there are a bunch of programs They just can't have it handle these image previews very well, but ST actually does a pretty decent job It's the only problem is sometimes when you mouse away from it the image disappears, but So anyway, and as I said you are this is usually thought of as being kind of a Bad thing because a lot of people are confused by it, but ST is also source-based So what I mean by that is the intended way that you're supposed to configure ST is not by changing a dot file but by going into its source files and there is a config dot H file and This is where you actually set the settings and when once you've changed the settings you just recompile it now That sounds really complicated, but it's just again running pseudo make install I actually have it bound to a Vim button. So when I'm done editing this I can just run that or something like that But it's it's not it's not so It's not it's not so difficult the nice thing about I that I found again as a non-programmer the thing that I like about some of these suckless programs ST included is there's not like a a Rigid line between what a dot file is and what like the actual program is Once you start start playing around with patches and installing things you realize that even though I never sat down and learned C or something like that I'm starting to understand how this thing works and I can make modifications if need be so I think that it is Very helpful that there's not like a border between what the user can change and what they can't if you're in this mindset of changing The actual source code sometimes you need a lot more about out of your program, but anyway, let's actually talk about this anyway so here again is the config file I'm gonna go down to my My shortcuts that I've mapped and some of these I talked about in the last video But I'll just go over them because again, I get questions about them Now by default suckless is so minimal that it doesn't even have the ability to scroll back in its history But of course, I've added this and to scroll up and down you can press alt K to go up and alt J to go down Vim keys, of course or to go up faster you and D more Vim like keys One question I get a lot is how do I zoom in on the terminal and I've mapped that to Alt shift and K that is zoom in in ST and zoom out is J again Vim keys, of course and To get it back to the normal zoom level you press alt and I think home I don't actually use that very often I really only zoom in on stuff when I'm doing videos just because I feel like people might like a little bigger text But again, all of these are changed in the source code and you just recompile it and you can get whatever you want from it But so that's that I also have mouse scroll if you hold down alt and scroll up Or I think you can hold shift and scroll up. It'll scroll back in the terminal history just the same way Now one of the big changes that I did add Let me get rid of the screen key for a second one of the changes that I have ads added since I did my last video and this is sort of at the request of a bunch of people is People sort of found it annoying that you had to recompile every time like some there are some things like maybe color Or maybe some other basic settings that you want to be able to change in a kind of dot file That's fair So I added in a patch which will actually read Some of your settings from X resources so you can set your font your colors your background You know your alpha value your transparency value that is from your X resources. So I can go over Actually, yeah, go ahead and pull up my X resources file Where you'll see that I have some a color scheme set here I have grub box as my active color scheme and I have this other one brogrammer So if I just as an example, so let's what is Space yeah, so here what my colors will look like now I can't just go in here I can comment these out and uncomment these and Oh, yeah, you do have to you know, it is an X resources file So you have to run XRDB X resources Vim just runs it automatically for me on my you know in my Vim configuration But so I can go here and you'll see that there's a slightly different color in this terminal since we have changed them Changed these settings here. So you can vary easily with my newer build of ST You can easily change color settings or something else like that. Let me get rid of I don't actually like that color scheme that much But you know, it's fine So you can also change your alpha value again. My default is 220. Let's say we want it really transparent I can change it to 150 and that's what that looks like or let's say we don't want transparency at all change it to 255 and Go over here and that's what that's gonna look like. So again these settings you don't have to change your You you don't have to recompile it. You don't even have to have the source code. You can just you know, as I said ST will automatically read any of these Settings from your extra sources file. So that's one thing I have added in Additionally, just because I feel like I should because people use my you know my build or whatever I did actually add all the new stuff into the man So if you type in man ST once you install my build all the stuff will come up all the bindings and another thing Oh, I didn't mention a second ago. I forgot. I do have the ability to copy and paste So if I want to copy this stuff just alt C and I can paste it in with alt V or Shift insert because some terminals have shift insert as they're as they're um, I don't know They're paste command or something like that. So that is another thing as well But the other thing that I added in I think I just pushed this to the repo a couple days ago or something But the other thing I added in is okay. It's opaque. It's sort of annoying me Let me let me actually change this back to the what I had it before So what I added a couple days ago, let's say I have some I out put some text And here's the text of my website and there are some URLs in here that I want to follow now I could copy and paste them But that requires a mouse and as far as I'm concerned using the mouse is like pulling teeth for me I just don't like it. Just not my thing So what you can do is said let me actually close out of this browser so you can see it when it spawns So what I added recently there's a nice little well I'll just show you how it works You can type in alt and then L and that will give you a D menu list of all of the links that appear on ST on this particular window of ST right now So I can let's say I want to follow this link I can just click on that and it's gonna pop up in a browser It just uses XDG open or whatever to you know pop up So there's my link I can follow that So I added this just a couple days ago you can of course I mentioned before you can use What is it called URL scan or URL view for some programs? But it's nice just being able to actually so what the patch actually is I close out of it What the patch what the patch actually is is External pipe it just takes all of the content on ST and pipes it to some other program And I just stole the example from the suckless site, which just pipes it to oh Yeah, I should say that that feature requires Xurls to be installed just so so mind that you have to install Xurls But once you have that you should be able to have this little feature with D menu Oh, yeah, and D menu has to be installed But so anyway, that's about it again if you want to get my build of ST You can just go to github and go to Which my github is Luke Smith XYZ and it's just ST and you can get clone it and install it yourself I'm thinking about adding it to the AUR maybe I'm not entirely sure But I might do that just because I know a lot of guys use it and it would actually be easier for me since I have you know The the larves installer of my dot files. It would actually be easier to read it from the the AUR or whatever But that's about it if you have any other suggestions for you're free to make them any other questions and You can check the documentation or anything if you you know if there are anything Anything that might arise from that, but I hope you learned something check it out if you're interested and see you next time