Hi Casey,
Casey Witt <kcwitt(a)gmail.com> writes:
Hi Dan,
> On Sun, May 9, 2021 at 4:27 PM Dan Čermák
> <dan.cermak(a)cgc-instruments.com> wrote:
>> Eduard Lucena <x3mboy(a)fedoraproject.org> writes:
>>
>> >> 4. replace urxvt terminal with alacritty (why bother configuring
>> uxrvt to
>> >> be usable when there are other terminals that work out of the
>> box?).
>> >>
>> >> ```
>> >> sudo dnf install alacritty
>> >> sudo dnf remove rxvt-unicode
>> >> ```
>> >>
>> >
>> > rxvt-unicode has half of the size of alacritty. We discuss this a
>> lot in
>> > the early days, and we choose rxvt-unicode because it's
>> likeweight and it's
>> > the most used in i3 default installations.
>>
>> I am personally against alacritty, because it causes ugly screen
>> tearing
>> on my Precision 5530 and does not even start on my Thinkpad x200t. I
>> usually use st, but that's not a terminal emulator for everyone.
I tried `st` terminal emulator and first impressions are great. The
colors look great, and so far it has worked well with ssh on all my
remote servers (alacritty causes 'terminal not fully functional' on
some ssh sessions for me for some reason which I am not much interested
in investigating).
Based on my very limited experience with `st` I would definitely think
that it should be considered as the default terminal for the i3 spin
because "it just works" (for me so far at least, so others experiences
would be useful to know also).
You mention it's "not a terminal emulator for everyone". Is there
anything specific you had in mind?
Yes, have you tried changing the font size ;-) ? If you want to do that,
you have to recompile st. Same goes for changing the colors, or the font
type. And there is absolutely no scrollback support. Fortunately the
Fedora package has some handy scripts to do that yourself, but it's
still an inconvenience.
st works for me, because I like the defaults (or have grown accustomed
to them) and use tmux, so the lack of scrollback does not bother me. But
I still think that st is a bad default, because it just does not support
all the features that as a new user you'd expect from a terminal
emulator. If alacritty wouldn't cause issues here and there, I'd vote
for that being the default. But unfortunately alacritty *needs* hardware
acceleration and will not start on old machines.
Cheers,
Dan