wiki/wiki/linux/suckless.md

Suckless

Suckless is a community that is best known for minimalist free software. Notable works include dwm and dmenu.

Programs

• dmenu is a menu with prgram launcher functionality
• dwm is a window manager
• ii is an IRC client
• slock is a screen locker
• st is a terminal

Setup

Programs written by the suckless community are minimal by default. .diff files are available to patch functionality. Configuring is done in the config.h file. Expressions in <> may need replacement.

• If not already created initialize a git repository
• Create and switch to the base brach with git branch base
• Download the default version of the suckless program you want to patch
• Add and commit all the files in the base branch
• Clean the master branch with make clean & rm -f config.h & git reset --hard origin/base
• Apply patches (this has to be done only once for each branch (except updates))
  • Create and switch to a new branch for the patch with git branch <feature>
  • Download the .diff file of the according feature into your directory
  • Apply the patch to the current directory with git apply <feature>.diff
  • Add and commit all the files in the <feature> branch
• Merge all branches into master branch (sometimes you can skip already merged ones)
  • Merge each branch (except the new feature) into master with git merge <feature>
    • (maybe you have to manually merge some errors)
• If you have a config branch merge config into master before adding the new feature
• Finally update the config branch
  • If not created already create a config branch from the base branch
  • Get the config.def.h of master into config with git checkout master config.def.h

Troubleshooting

suckless program crashes or struggles with colored emojis

Suckless programs especially st and dmenu can not display colored emojis. This is because of problems with libxft. libxft is the client side font rendering library to display anti-aliased text. To change this libxft-bgra needs to be installed. This is a patched version especially for running with the suckless programs.