 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today I'm going to be talking about ST, the simple terminal. Now, those of you who know me or have been following along with the channel, you know that I'm a big fan of termite. And it hurt to leave termite behind for a little while, but I wanted to try something a little different. And I really have enjoyed my time over the last six months or so with DWM. It's really been a good experience because it feels like I've built something from the ground up. You know, my version of ST is different than pretty much everyone else's version of ST, or at least it feels that way. I'm sure somebody else uses the exact combination of patches that I use and whatever. But it feels like my version of ST is something that I built and I can be proud of. I think that's the reason why I really like DWM. It's the reason why I like window managers to begin with, but DWM has the extra mile instead of just doing the racing, you also have to go through and add in the features that you want. And that's kind of cool. And I thought with ST, I'd have the same experience because, you know, you'd start with just a plain old terminal emulator, you got to go through and add in certain features that are pretty standard in every other terminal emulator. And you build it up from the ground up. And by the time you're done, you have something that you can, you know, put up on GitHub and you always have it exactly the same way. And it's just kind of cool. That's the way I thought I would feel. But that's not the way I feel. Honestly, I feel the opposite. I feel that patching and going through and having to recompile your configuration file every time you make a change to your terminal is really annoying. And it's not a feeling that I had with DWM because DWM I was feeling like it was just putting all those patches in was just part of the racing process. It was part of customizing my desktop, which is something that, you know, I do every three or four months. If I wait that long, you know, I always go through and, you know, I move to a different window manager and there's a process of after you've, you've hopped to a new window manager of going through and setting it up, whether if it's brand new, you go through and do everything for the first time, or maybe you download your stuff from GitHub and put in your dot files. And it's always a process. And it's kind of something that's rewarding because you're going from, you know, stock all the way to, you know, whatever your configuration looks like and feels like with ST, it was just not that experience. It was, it felt like a burden. It felt like a hassle. And it wasn't a good feeling. It wasn't that there's anything wrong with ST. I mean, even out of the box, ST is usable. It's not like DWM is fairly unusable when you're not using something, a few patches at least with ST, you get out of the box. It's, you know, you can go through and change the colors and you can zoom in and zoom out and stuff that stuff all comes out of the box, which is good. I mean, it's just once you move past the out of the box experience and want to add something like as simple as scroll back, you know, something that is standard on every terminal emulator, even X term, I think has scroll back. I mean, I may be wrong. I don't use X term, but it's when you get to that point of having to patch stuff, it's like, I have to do this. Like, why isn't this here? I just want to do my work. I want to open up NC spot or something. I want to go through and do all these commands and I have to patch something in order to actually do the thing I want to do. It was, it was, it felt icky, you know, and maybe it's because I don't spend as much time ricing my terminal as I do my desktop environment because racing my terminal is simple. It's going change the colors from whatever terminal that sexy tells me to change it to and, you know, it comes out the right way. I spend some time with the prompt, but that's done through ZSA. It's not done through the terminal. All the my prompts that are pretty much the same no matter what terminal I'm in. So maybe that's the reason why it felt like a burden or a hassle. I don't know. I think that in the long run, I probably could get used to ST because I've gone through and made my changes now. I've gone through. I've got the scroll back patch. I've got a couple other patches that I've, you know, I needed to copy and paste and do these other things. I think if I'd use, continue to use it, it would be fine because like I said, I'm there. I've got it to the point where it's basically the way I want it. I probably would go through and change some of the key bindings because some of the key bindings are weird. So if you want to zoom in, it's control, shift, page up, page down. That's no bueno. It's just too many key presses in order to do it. Scrolling up with the scroll, scroll patch is also very weird. It's a two handed to come two handed operation. You have to hit shift and then your scroll wheel or shift and page up and page down. It's not, I don't want to use both hands. Okay. It's, it's maybe it's a weird hang up a half. But if I want to scroll up, I just want to scroll up because chances are my other hand is going to be doing a key combination of some other sort, you know, or whatever. Maybe I'm grabbing for a snack or something. I don't know. It's just, it was a death by a thousand cuts with ST was all these little things that just were really annoying. And like I said, if I were to use it for longer and change even more stuff to kind of suit it to my needs, it'd be fine. But I don't want to is the thing where is I wanted to go. I felt like I wanted to continue to improve DWM with ST. I dread having to change something every single time I go in there because it's just, it's it's not as if it's hard. It's just stupid. I mean, it's just, I don't know. It's just really, I think most of it is because every other terminal emulator is basically the same. I mean, terminal emulator just all do the same thing. What varies is the speed and some of the features and how they're configured and what they're written in. Right? So you use other terminal emulators and all your features are there. They're just baked in. Now you can change things to alter them to how you want them in most terminals. But everything just works out of the box and there's no hassle. Even when changing colors, like if you change colors in ST, you have to go in and change your colors. Well, excuse me. First you have to delete your config.h file. Then you have to change your colors. Then you have to compile it and then you have to close it and then you have to restart it. That's way too many steps. I just want to go through and change the colors and close it. I mean, that's the way it should be. I mean, I understand that compiling doesn't take that long. It really doesn't. It took, it took like, I don't know, five seconds. I mean, whatever. I mean, it's a five second step, but it's the principle of the matter, right? It's the dammit. I don't want to spend those five seconds compiling it when I could just close it and restart it. I change colors often enough that it's a pain. It's also, they've buried the appearance settings in the configuration file until it's like halfway down the configuration file and you have to scroll down every single time you want to go to the colors. I mean, it's not a big deal because you can always just search for it or whatever in rim, but when you're coming from termite, which has the smallest configuration file you've ever seen, you know, it's a big thing to ask. I'm making myself sound like a lazy person, but I mean, it's true. I just want my terminal emulator to work. I don't want to have to go through and scroll down every time I change colors because I change colors in my terminal emulator all the time. Anyways, so that is my brief thoughts on my two months with the simple terminal, the ST. I'm leaving ST to go to some other terminal. I'm either going to go back to termite where I'll be happy, happy, happy, or I'll be going to alacrity. Now I'm probably going to give alacrity a try. I think I'm going to have some of the same problems with alacrity because the configuration file is huge mungus and I don't really care for that. I don't want to have to sift through 5,000 lines of comments in order to do my configuration because another thing that you may know about me, I don't read instructions. Instructions are for other people, not me. I just want to get in there and be able to know what I'm doing without having to read instructions and if you have 5,000 lines of instructions, you're doing it wrong because I don't want to have to have a college education or a higher college education, I guess in this case, in order to configure my terminal. So that is it for this video. Make sure you follow us on Twitter at TheLinuxCast. We're also on Facebook, facebook.com slash linuxcast. You can support us on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast and with that in mind, I would like to shout out, I guess, our current patrons Devon Marcus, Merrick Camp 514. Thanks for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.