My personal build of st - the simple (suckless) terminal

The suckless terminal (st) with some additional features that make it literally the best terminal emulator ever!

Patches

• alpha
• font2
• ligatures
• wide glyph support
• undercurl

Extra Features

• copy text with alt-c, paste text with alt-v or shift-insert

Installation

The following dependencies should already be installed before continuing with any of the following steps

• xlib header files
• libharfbuzz build files sudo apt install libharfbuzz-dev
• make
• fontconfig
• libX11
• libXft

Fonts:

• JetbrainsMono Mono Nerd Font or any nerd font from here.
• fonts-noto-color-emoji sudo apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji
• fonts-powerline sudo apt install fonts-powerline

Most likely you have all of these installed already.

git clone git@github.com:vandycknick/st.git
make
sudo make install

Be sure to have a composite manager (xcompmgr, picom, etc.) running if you want transparency.

Emojis and Special Characters

It could be that st crashes while trying to render an emoji or special character. This is due to a shortcoming/bug in libXft, this is fixed as of version 2.3.5. Modern or rolling linux distros like Arch should already shipped with a patched libXft library. On older distros you'll have to build libXft from source and apply the pacth manually:

Clone libXft:

git https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxft
cd libxft
git checkout libXft-2.3.6
sh autogen.sh --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man
sudo make install

Backup current libXFT binary and replace old lib with patched version:

sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/libXft.so.2.3.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXft.so.2.3.6
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXft.so.2.3.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXft.so
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXft.so.2.3.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXft.so.2

Configure ST as your default terminal emulator

With update-alternatives you can configure st as your default terminal emulator with just a few commands:

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator x-terminal-emulator /usr/local/bin/st 0

sudo update-alternatives --set x-terminal-emulator /usr/local/bin/st

Upgrade ST

Clone the upstream ST repository locally:

git clone git://git.suckless.org/st upstream

Go into the upstream directory and create a patch between the current version and the latest version.

The current version can be found at the top of the config.mk file

cd upstream
mkdir -p ../patches
git diff 0.8.4 0.8.5 > ../patches/st-0.8.5.diff

This creates a new patch, which can be applied with git apply

cd ..
git apply --reject --whitespace=fix ./patches/st-0.8.5

Fixup any rejected patches and run make to create a new build.