Steve's build of st - the simple (suckless) terminal

The suckless terminal (st) with some additional features that make it literally the best terminal emulator ever:

Unique features (using dmenu)

• follow urls by pressing alt-l
• copy urls in the same way with alt-y
• copy the output of commands with alt-o

Bindings for

• scrollback with alt-↑/↓ or alt-pageup/down or shift while scrolling the mouse.
• OR vim-bindings: scroll up/down in history with alt-k and alt-j. Faster with alt-u/alt-d.
• zoom/change font size: same bindings as above, but holding down shift as well. alt-home returns to default
• copy text with alt-c, paste is alt-v or shift-insert

Pretty stuff

• Compatibility with Xresources and pywal for dynamic colors.
• Default gruvbox colors otherwise.
• Transparency/alpha, which is also adjustable from your Xresources.
• Default font is system "mono" at 14pt, meaning the font will match your system font.

Other st patches

• Boxdraw
• Ligatures
• font2
• updated to latest version 0.8.4

Installation for newbs

You should have xlib header files and libharfbuzz build files installed.

git clone https://github.com/hghann/st
cd st
sudo make install

Obviously, make is required to build. fontconfig is required for the default build, since it asks fontconfig for your system monospace font. It might be obvious, but libX11 and libXft are required as well. Chances are, you have all of this installed already.

On OpenBSD, be sure to edit config.mk first and remove -lrt from the $LIBS before compiling.

Be sure to have a composite manager (xcompmgr, picom, etc.) running if you want transparency.

How to configure dynamically with Xresources

For many key variables, this build of st will look for X settings set in either ~/.Xdefaults or ~/.Xresources. You must run xrdb on one of these files to load the settings.

For example, you can define your desired fonts, transparency or colors:

*.font:	Liberation Mono:pixelsize=12:antialias=true:autohint=true;
*.alpha: 0.9
*.color0: #111
...

The alpha value (for transparency) goes from 0 (transparent) to 1 (opaque). There is an example Xdefaults file in this respository.

Colors

To be clear about the color settings:

• This build will use gruvbox colors by default and as a fallback.
• If there are Xresources colors defined, those will take priority.
• But if wal has run in your session, its colors will take priority.

Note that when you run wal, it will negate the transparency of existing windows, but new windows will continue with the previously defined transparency.

Notes on Emojis and Special Characters

If st crashes when viewing emojis, install libxft-bgra from the AUR.

Note that some special characters may appear truncated if too wide. You might want to manually set your prefered emoji/special character font to a lower size in the config.h file to avoid this. By default, JoyPixels is used at a smaller size than the usual text.

Contact

• Luke Smith luke@lukesmith.xyz
• https://lukesmith.xyz