- This topic has 75 replies, 9 voices, and was last updated Jan 23-6:48 pm by techore.
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techore
antiX 22 dwm Unofficial is my antiX spin using Suckless’ dynamic window manager, dwm, via bakkeby’s dwm-flexipatch.
Download:
https://archive.org/details/antix-22-runit-dwmRepository and documentation:
https://gitlab.com/techore/antix-dwmOpen issues:
https://gitlab.com/techore/antix-dwm/-/issues
blur13
Thank you for this!
I’ll give this a try. I really want to like dwm, its on my to-do list to learn how to use (or rather, appreciate) a tiling wm. Too bad about kitty, its too memory intensive for my old school laptops. And it seems like its too deeply integrated to just switch to another terminal emulator. From the FAQ
“Many of antix-dwm shell scripts including rofi directly reference kitty (or fish). As a consequence of uninstalling the package, you will need to update scripts or reinstall the package.
I am open to contributions to provide flexibility on preferred terminals and shells. The primay challenge is the alternatives must permit arguments to specify window class or name due to the use with antiX programs and dwm rules.”The two terminal I use (ST and Alacritty) both allow window class and name to be specified. For instance ST, st -n name -c name.
I’ll try this out on a more modern machine first. If I like it I’ll try to “purge” kitty and integrate ST instead. Anyways, I can tell that you put a lot of effort into this. Way to go!
iznit
idea — create a symlink and/or alias, redirecting “kitty” to something else
blur13
smart! Too bad kitty uses –name –class and st uses -n -c or I guess a simple symlink would have worked out of the box.
andyprough
That is a sweet looking setup. I’m looking forward to putting it through some testing, nice work!
BobC
But if you look how desktop-defaults-run works, for example, maybe you could allow for it to pass different parameters for different terminal programs, as needed? as long as you could figure out what to pass.
techore
This has been a five month project. There were a number of items left undone that I plan for the next version which I will begin after completing a couple other languishing projects.
Too bad about kitty, its too memory intensive for my old school laptops. And it seems like its too deeply integrated to just switch to another terminal emulator. From the FAQ
I had reservations with using kitty as the primary terminal. Its pretty darn amazing but I agree that all those features come with a price. Initially, I started with st but as I invested more and more time in kitty, I dropped st but I feared it would be a barrier to entry for older hardware. Based on your post, I regret the decision.
If st or alternative terminal would have been an acceptable solution for folks with older hardware, @blue13, would you be willing to participate in sharing with me your ideas and testing?
I’ll give this a try. I really want to like dwm, its on my to-do list to learn how to use (or rather, appreciate) a tiling wm.
I love it and wish I had been introduced to it earlier. I used i3 for several years. It was a great to transition from floating to tiling window manager. I found i3 easier to setup and configure but I prefer dwm.
andyprough
Personally I really dislike st. If I was going to change the terminal, based on it being an antiX respin, I would take a long look at roxterm. It has always been a perfect citizen inside dwm for my purposes.
Just my 2 cents, don’t mind me. By the way, I think Kitty looks VERY nice the way you have it configured. I’ve tried Kitty before and I must say I don’t think I understood it before, now that I see how beautiful and intelligent it is in your respin here. Maybe there would be a way to have this heavily configured Kitty alongside a lighter terminal as an alternative for low memory systems?
techore
Personally I really dislike st. If I was going to change the terminal, based on it being an antiX respin, I would take a long look at roxterm. It has always been a perfect citizen inside dwm for my purposes.
Just my 2 cents, don’t mind me. By the way, I think Kitty looks VERY nice the way you have it configured. I’ve tried Kitty before and I must say I don’t think I understood it before, now that I see how beautiful and intelligent it is in your respin here. Maybe there would be a way to have this heavily configured Kitty alongside a lighter terminal as an alternative for low memory systems?
I don’t see why there couldn’t be both a lightweight terminal and kitty. I’ll need to think on how it would be accomplished but I am game to give it a go.
I’ll may open a vote here for feedback.
What lightweight terminals should be considered? The lightweight terminal must support at least setting the title. Class provides a broader category but shouldn’t be strictly necessary but may result in more dwm rules (work).
Notes:
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kitty provides –class, –name, and –title
alacritty provides –class and –titleBoth kitty and alacritty depend on opengl.
Lightweight? alternatives
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xterm provides -title (-T)
st provides –class, –name, and –title
roxterm provides –title- This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by techore.
- This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by techore.
andyprough
I don’t know what each provides, but sakura and lxterminal are nice, light and have typical features like scrollback. I don’t personally need a light alternative though, I’m finding this configuration of Kitty is more than good enough. I think I remove my earlier vote for a lighter alternative. Also I’m loving the way you set up rofi. I’m a seriously committed dmenu user, but this rofi setup was almost instantly comfortable and intuitive for me.
andyprough
So is the reason kitty looks and acts so well because of fish? I installed stock kitty on stock antiX and I don’t see any of these nice features, and when I look in ~/.config/kitty/ on your spin I don’t see any config files. Sorry, I’m new to this part of things as you can probably tell.
techore
Probably and it depends.
As far as over-all capabilities, you are probably using fish. fish is pretty darn amazing. The only outstanding issue I have with fish on antix-dwm is fixing or breaking the auto-completion feature. Under some circumstances it gets in the way and is super frustrating.
kitty provides colors (so does fish) as well as tabs, windows like tmux, font, and other functionality. Take a look at it’s cheatsheet, mod+shift+ctrl+p.
I still need to do some work with kitty. For example, I will probably change the scrollback buffer (shift-ctrl+h) to use (n)vim versus less. Right now it feels clunky.
antix-dwm kitty and fish config file locations are /etc/fish/ and /etc/xdg/kitty/. Use the ~/.config/fish|kitty/ to override antix-dwm settings.
@andyprough, keep asking questions and giving me feedback. Gives me ideas on future changes and enhancements. I appreciate the collaboration.
- This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by techore.
blur13
If the respin is heavily invested in Kitty and its working wonders then stay with Kitty. That would be my recommendation.
Everyone has their preferences regarding terminals. When I’m not memory constrained I prefer Alacritty. When I’m on an ancient system I prefer ST.
The problem with Kitty is that each instance takes up a lot of memory. I just tried firing up four instances and I’m at 270 MiB. Four x ST is 9.8 MiB. On my low spec systems I usually try to relegate most tasks to CLI programs. So I’ll have one instance running CMUS for music, another Alpine for checking mail, etc. So in that case I’ll optimize for memory. Not having scrollback is a non-issue for programs with ncurses interface that provide their own scrollback (for lack of a better term). Also, ST can be patched to include scrollback. But Roxterm is also a good alternative.
So the choice of Kitty in the respin doesnt optimize for memory, but why should it? However, everything else in the respin happens to be extremely memory efficient so it has the potential to optimize for memory. So I might tinker with it. But I dont think that should influence the design philosophy of the respin.
techore
@blur13, I appreciate the feedback and your support. I need to hear the perspective of folks with older and lower end hardware. Thank you.
I am going add using st or an alternative to the spin to improve the efficiency for lower end systems if possible. I love the idea of being more efficient and permitting adoption to a larger audience.
After a short break, I’ll start working on it.
andyprough
Also, ST can be patched to include scrollback
I recall one time I patched st repeatedly and configured it for hours to do all the things I need from a normal terminal, and then I found that in that condition it uses just as much memory as roxterm, so all that work was a bit of a waste. But I can definitely see that it’s perfect for what you are doing, in opening a bunch of super-low memory terminals to do one thing at a time with. st would be much better looking to do that with than xterm.
Actually, maybe st would be a good light terminal alternative for this respin. If you’re only opening it to run a quick command or to run a cli music player or something it would work great. As long as you aren’t expecting to do hours of work in it on difficult scripting or configurations – in that case you would probably want to patch it up pretty heavily.
- This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by andyprough.
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