05. Keep the Terminal Simple

Recap

In the last post, I set up dwm with quite a lot of patches. It was relatively easy, but not the most fun thing to do. Today, I'll have to go through a bit more of that suffering. For in this post, I am setting up the Suckless terminal, the simple terminal, st.

Quite a lot of terminals

People usually go for other terminal emulators: Terminator, Alacritty, Kitty, etc.
BUT. Here I am going for the Suckless alternative again, why? Do I like suffering? (Maybe, a lot of my life decisions I made were not as well thought out as I'd wish.)
As much as patching can be a pain in the rear sometimes, I must say it can also be fun, and the result can be very fulfilling.

Patching Time!

I will be patching st in a similar manner as I did for dwm, with the only change being that I won't cover the actual patching. I will hold myself to only exceptional cases.
So the patches I'm applying are the following in the exact order and specific versions:

  • scrollback - st-scrollback-ringbuffer-0.9.2.diff
  • alpha - st-alpha-20220206-0.8.5.diff
  • boxdraw - st-boxdraw_v2-0.8.5.diff
  • ligatures - st-ligatures-alpha-scrollback-ringbuffer-20241226-0.9.2.diff
  • Additionally for mouse support with scrollback: st-scrollback-mouse-0.9.2.diff & st-scrollback-mouse-altscreen-20220127-2c5edf2.diff
  • sync - st-appsync-20200618-b27a383.diff
  • xresources - st-xresources-20230320-45a15676.diff
  • font2 - st-font2-0.8.5.diff
  • netwmicon - st-netwmicon-0.8.5-v2.diff
  • clipboard - st-clipboard-20180309-c5ba9c0.diff

Consult the patch page for more info on each patch.

Now, the most interesting part of the patch is ligatures and the fact that it is applied after all three of scrollback, alpha, and boxdraw. The developers made patches that fit in with the first two, and that is the one being applied, but a conflict arose with a section of code that boxdraw patches.
Fortunately, the developers also have a separate patch that fits with boxdraw. I opened that .diff file, pinpointed the section I needed, and with some simple copying and pasting magic, as well as wrapping my head around what was happening in that block, I fixed it.

Wrapping Up

Well, this post was quite the short one, mainly because I did not bother going through the exact steps of patching st. Next post will be about yet another Suckless tool.

Written on: 2026-08-02