st

st ("simple terminal") is a minimal terminal emulator for X from the suckless project, written in C under the MIT license. It exists because the suckless developers consider xterm, with over 65,000 lines of code, and rxvt far more complex than a terminal emulator needs to be. It is for people who like to read, patch and recompile their tools.

What st implements is deliberately short: most VT10x escape sequences, serial line support, XIM input, UTF-8 and wide characters, 256 colors and true color, antialiased fonts through fontconfig with fallback fonts, line drawing, clipboard handling and resizing. Several things other terminals build in are left to other programs. utmp entries are handled by the separate utmp tool. There is no scrollback, and the FAQ suggests running st -e tmux or st -e screen, using the suckless scroll tool, or applying the scrollback patch. It has no tabs or splits.

There is no runtime config file. You configure st by editing config.h, which is generated from the defaults in config.def.h, and recompiling. Fonts, colors, shortcuts and mouse bindings are all set there. Extra features are added with patches from st.suckless.org/patches, so every user's st is effectively a custom build. If you skip make install, programs may say the terminal is unknown because the st terminfo entry was never installed. The FAQ's fix is tic -sx st.info.

The repository linked from this catalog entry is Luke Smith's build of st, not upstream suckless. It applies the ligatures, boxdraw and font2 patches and adds scrollback with Alt plus arrow or vim-style keys, font zoom, Xresources and pywal colors, transparency, and dmenu-based shortcuts to follow URLs (Alt-L), copy URLs (Alt-Y) and copy command output (Alt-O). Building it needs the Xlib and HarfBuzz development files.