st is a simple terminal emulator for X which sucks less. See the project page for details.
st is configured by patching the source code. This version of st diverges from upstream by applying the following patches:
-
Scrollback: Allows scrolling through the terminal history with PgUp and PgDn (one screen at a time) and with the mouse wheel. I've squashed all three patches into one commit.
-
Fix Keyboard Input: Allows CLI applications running through st to use advanced key combinations like
<Ctrl-Tab>.
Finally, there are some patches I wrote which customise trivial things like colours and fonts. Those are kept on the master branch, which is rebased on top of the most recent patched release.
The official README says you need "the Xlib header files" to build locally. I
don't know what that means. However, since st has a Gentoo e-build, we can
find the dependencies by inspecting that file. Indeed, simply installing
vanilla st in Gentoo will necessarily provide you with all build dependencies,
and has the nice consequence that they will be cleaned up if and only if you
remove st from your system. In something like Ubuntu, you might be able to
install apt-build, but I don't know much about that.
emerge st
# /usr/portage/x11-terms/st/st-0.8.4.ebuild
...
RDEPEND="
>=sys-libs/ncurses-6.0:0=
media-libs/fontconfig
x11-libs/libX11
x11-libs/libXft
"
DEPEND="
${RDEPEND}
virtual/pkgconfig
x11-base/xorg-proto
"
To build in the project directory, first apply any patches you are interested in,
git apply feature,patch
make all
./st
For developing against the main version of st, you will want to set the remote upstream and fetch all tags.
git remote add upstream https://git.suckless.org/st
git fetch
git checkout 0.8.4
Edit config.mk to match your local setup (st is installed into the /usr/local namespace by default).
Afterwards enter the following command to build and install st (if necessary as root):
make clean install
The wiki has a guide for patching programs. This project has, for each release of st-x.y.z that I have installed, a branch x.y.z-patched, which should be used to build against that version.
# set up a patches directory from the build directory (as root)
mkdir -p /etc/portage/patches/x11-terms && ln -s $(realpath .) /etc/portage/patches/x11-terms/st
# build all patches and reinstall
git checkout 0.8.4-patched
rm -f *.patch
git format-patch 0.8.4
sudo emerge st
You should see something like:
>>> Installing (1 of 1) x11-terms/st-0.8.4::gentoo
* Messages for package x11-terms/st-0.8.4:
* User patches applied.
* Your configuration for x11-terms/st-0.8.4 has been saved in
* "/etc/portage/savedconfig/x11-terms/st-0.8.4" for your editing pleasure.
* You can edit these files by hand and remerge this package with
* USE=savedconfig to customise the configuration.
Now, if you uninstall st through Portage, it will clean up the build tree properly. You still need to remember to purge this patch directory, though.
The delete key will not work properly if you use bash. There is a note about this on the FAQ. To fix it, add the line
set enable-keypad on
to your $HOME/.inputrc file.