I’ve been a suckless software user for a long time because the software was superior to a lot of other options out there. If you have never experienced the blazing fast speed of st opening, you are definitely missing out. Sadly it was time for me to leave st behind and move on to a new terminal that I think offers a lot of benefits.

Why I Liked st

• Speed. st launches instantly
• Config as code is cool. That combined with the patching culture really provides some fun puzzles. Who knew reading your terminal source code to fix a broken patch could be so fun.
• DWM swallow patch compatibility. If you use the swallow patch, st works flawlessly.

Why I Switched to ghostty

• Time constraints. Two kids means no time to debug patches and code when I want modern features like ligatures.
• Modern niceties. Ligatures and images in terminal are supported out of the box. I spent way too long trying to unsuccessfully get sixel support in st.
• Cross-platform config. Same configuration file on both Linux and work Mac. Reduces burden of swapping dev environments.
• Swallowing compatibility. Unlike WezTerm and others, ghostty plays nice with DWM’s swallow patch. Since WezTerm uses existing terminals to create new terminals, the process tree for the swallow patch gets messed up. This leads to the wrong terminal windows getting swallowed which is very frustrating.
• Fast enough. Noticeably slower to start than st but faster than everything else I’ve tried.

I definitely think I’m losing cool points by swapping from my handcrafted st build, but priorities change and the ghostty guy is pretty cool. Hopefully this doesn’t commence my slide down the slippery slope straight into an Apple Store shudder.

Another quick post that may be useful to somebody else. I’ve been working at UKG for about 4 months now. In my work I use a Mac laptop. I’ve tried my best to unify my configurations between my personal Linux system and the Mac dev machine provided by UKG to reduce headaches when having to switch from professional to personal projects. This even went as far as trying to configure OpenBox to be more like the MacOS desktop environment (HA a big failed endeavour). While I ultimately found peace with differences in desktop environments, there was another thing I found very hard to deal with.

This is going to be primarily opinion based post but I want to talk about a shakeup that has happened. I have uninstalled Artix from all of my computers and have instead swapped them to Void Linux. This is the first time I have changed Linux distros in about 3/4 years and was done with a heavy heart as having to setup a new system is always a pain. Regardless I have been using void linux for about 2-3 months and I am finding it a much better experience than Artix, and I want to discuss the reasons why below.

I’m currently working on developing an implementation of the Concurrent Atomistic-Continuum method using C++ and CUDA to accelerate calculations. A need arose to use valgrind for debugging some memory issues. I currently run Artix Linux and it turns out that both Artix Linux and Arch Linux have fully removed all debug packages from their repositories and have swapped over to a debuginfod style system. On my system, said debuginfod was working with gdb but not with valgrind. In particular I was missing the debug symbols for glibc which prevented valgrind from working at all. I had to try a few things before I got it working so I want to share how I did. I also want to mention an issue I ran into if any guys from Artix Linux ever end up reading this post.