If you are a user of dwm, then you might also like suckless.org’s st (simple terminal), I’d like to dub it as “suckless terminal.” A thread about solarized st introduced me this two-year-old terminal emulator, first version 0.1 released in April, 2011.
As of writing, the latest version v0.4.1 was released on 2013-04-20.
On Gentoo, the latest version and older versions are still marked as unstable. Since I want to avoid ~arch as much as possible, therefore this post is just a quick note about st. However, I have no doubt in my mind, once st is moved to stable, I would start to transition into it as long as it runs properly with programs I use at that time.
Contents
1 The attraction
A quick quote from its webpage, even without specifically stating what st does better:
It [xterm] has over 65K lines of code and emulates obscure and obsolete terminals you will never need. The popular alternative, rxvt has only 32K lines of code.
st.c, v0.4.1, has only 3,397 lines. Do we need to say more? Even you count configuration file and some additional files, it can’t top that 32K lines. For me, this is pretty close to convincing me using it.
Nonetheless, which is more than enough for me to try it out. I noticed it’s like 5 seconds to emerge, really fast. Estimated re-emerge time by genlop:
- st: less than a minute (~10 to 20 seconds)
[ebuild R ~] x11-terms/st-0.4.1 USE="savedconfig" 0 kB- rxvt-unicode (urxvt): one minute (~30 to 120 seconds)
[ebuild R ] x11-terms/rxvt-unicode-9.18 USE="256-color blink font-styles perl xft -alt-font-width -buffer-on-clear -fading-colors -focused-urgency -iso14755 -mousewheel -pixbuf -secondary-wheel -startup-notification -unicode3 -vanilla -wcwidth" 0 kB- xterm: less than a minute (~30 to 40 seconds)
[ebuild N ] x11-terms/xterm-285 USE="toolbar truetype unicode -Xaw3d" 1,076 kB
As for dwm-like configuration file, since I am a dwm user, this type of configuration file seems more like a plus to me. Because you can expand or write your own code to enhance st in configuration file as I did to dwm. In urxvt, it’s impossible for me since I can’t even read Perl.
2 Quick tests
Detail versions and options:
st 0.4.1 (c) 2010-2013 st engineers
rxvt-unicode (urxvt) v9.18 - released: 2013-03-24
options: perl,xft,styles,combining,blink,encodings=eu+vn+jp+jp-ext+kr+zh+zh-ext,transparent,tint,XIM,frills,selectionscrolling,slipwheel,cursorBlink,pointerBlank,scrollbars=plain+rxvt+NeXT+xterm
The test configuration has only font setting modified, the rest is same as default. Please keep in mind that I know nothing about terminal emulator other than running them and print out stuff, so the numbers will be shown in the rest of post do not mean by rigorous testing.
2.1 Performance test
I used my script termfps.sh to test, which I wrote a while ago to test the speed of rendering, here is the results with same font setting Envy Code R:style=Regular:size=9:antialias=false:
| terminal | st | st/tmux | urxvtc | urxvtc/tmux | urxvt | urxvt/tmux |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| size | 138x24 | 138x23 | 118x24 | 118x23 | 118x24 | 118x23 |
| frames | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| characters | 331,200 | 317,400 | 283,200 | 271,400 | 283,200 | 271,400 |
| elapsed time (s) | 0.576 | 2.276 | 0.580 | 1.870 | 0.599 | 1.837 |
| characters/s | 575,000 | 139,455 | 488,275 | 145,176 | 472,788 | 147,784 |
Although st is about 17.76% faster, but within tmux, it runs a bit slower. Not sure what’s the cause.
Note that there is a different in terminal width/columns even I set them with same font size. But it doesn’t affect the results I want to see.
2.2 Launch time test
I use Bash time to calculate the launch time with /bin/true:
time <term command> -e '/bin/true'
Here is the results:
| term | st | urxvt | urxvtc |
|---|---|---|---|
| real | 0m0.382s | 0m0.259s | 0m0.032s |
| user | 0m0.333s | 0m0.213s | 0m0.000s |
| sys | 0m0.047s | 0m0.036s | 0m0.003s |
Surprisingly, st is slower to launch up.
2.3 Resource usage
%CPU %MEM VSZ RSS COMMAND
0.2 0.7 60828 14840 st
0.0 0.1 24872 2920 \_ bash
0.2 0.7 60828 14844 st
0.0 0.1 24872 2924 \_ bash
0.0 0.0 20916 1364 \_ tmux
0.6 1.1 119360 22692 urxvtd
0.0 0.0 20920 1356 \_ tmux
0.0 0.1 22776 2984 \_ bash
0.0 0.1 24852 2912 \_ bash
0.0 0.0 20920 1352 \_ tmux
0.0 0.0 13584 1660 startx
0.0 0.0 15932 1032 \_ xinit
0.0 0.0 28344 1784 \_ dwm
0.0 0.8 81340 18048 \_ urxvt
0.0 0.1 24852 2908 | \_ bash
0.1 0.8 81264 18148 \_ urxvt
0.0 0.1 24852 2868 \_ bash
0.0 0.0 20920 1352 \_ tmux
A st instance uses about 14.8 MB RSS (resident set size), urxvt uses about 18.0 MB, urxvt daemon uses about 22 MB, in my case, but hosts 4 windows.
3 Thoughts
I have been using rxvt-unicode for years, more specifically, its daemon/client mode. It’s fast and memory efficient if you have multiple windows opened. However, with terminal multiplexer like tmux or GNU/Screen, it has no advantage anymore since you most likely to tab or split tab into panes. Most of time, I only have one urxvtc. The only thing it benefits me, it (urxvtc) starts up fast, well, by 0.2 seconds.
Although the tests above don’t show st is better that urxvt overall, but it’s still relatively new and I would still switch to it once it gets stabilized. The reason is urxvt has more features than I actually use. (Do you know the Ctrl + MMB or Ctrl + RMB in urxvt?) One thing totally useless is the scroll buffer once you start to use terminal multiplexer.
The point is too many stuff you don’t use and you don’t understand, if you realize, then that might be the same reason you switch to dwm. You configure your WM and you know a little better about it. If you take a look at config.def.h, it looks a bit like configuration file of dwm, and we only put things we need.
By no means that I am saying urxvt isn’t good, in fact, it’s by far the most outstanding terminal emulator I have ever used. It’s fast, probably the fastest one. I know one thing I would be missing was an extension of urxvt, url-select, I love using keyboard, but I would survive.
Would I recommend anyone to try st out? Of course! Please do try it if you are looking for simple terminal.
More people use it, the better it would be when I switch to it, my ingenious evil plan has been revealed!
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