commit 5e6de4d059fe6e194654d82b3b2f247d2b362c2e
parent beea04504fe955cf845eb285cdcdf627d4aa54dd
Author: Jake Bauer <jbauer@paritybit.ca>
Date: Sun, 2 Aug 2020 20:15:00 -0400
Cleanup to alacritty blog post
Diffstat:
2 files changed, 42 insertions(+), 34 deletions(-)
diff --git a/pages/blog/switching-to-alacritty-removals.md b/pages/blog/switching-to-alacritty-removals.md
@@ -7,9 +7,26 @@
[//]: #
<p class="note">Below are the outtakes from my [switching to alacritty
-blogpost](/blog/switching-to-alacritty) because all the
-strikethrough text made it difficult to read. In case anyone is interested in
-what was removed, here it all is:</p>
+blogpost](/blog/switching-to-alacritty) which I decided to split off into its
+own page because all the strikethrough text made the original post difficult to
+read. In case anyone is interested in what was removed, here it all is:</p>
+
+From the responses in the Fediverse and Lobste.rs threads, I can no longer say
+that the Suckless folk were espousing far-right rhetoric or partaking in
+neo-nazi-like activities. As it turns out, at least from the responses in that
+thread, there was nothing political behind the torch march and the use of
+"Cultural Marxism" was taken out of context and the word was probably misused.
+
+We can still call out the use of "Wolfsschanze" as the name of the mail server
+is in bad taste and is offensive considering [where the term comes
+from](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf's_Lair), but it is hardly evidence that
+they are "literal neo-Nazis."
+
+The people who responded on the Fediverse I think were ultimately right, the
+evidence here is largely circumstantial and I was mistaken in drawing the
+conclusions that I did. I am sorry for that.
+
+---
I've been a pretty happy user of St, the Simple Terminal from Suckless for quite
a few months now. However, as I was scrolling through my Fediverse timeline
diff --git a/pages/blog/switching-to-alacritty.md b/pages/blog/switching-to-alacritty.md
@@ -9,30 +9,20 @@
<div class="byline">
<b>Written By:</b> Jake Bauer |
<b>Posted:</b> 2020-07-24 |
- <b>Last Updated:</b> 2020-07-25
+ <b>Last Updated:</b> 2020-07-31
</div>
<p class="note">This post was originally also about separating creators from
their work but, thanks to [the discussion on the
-Fediverse](https://pleroma.paritybit.ca/notice/9xQZNCVzQRiZdtxoeG), I was alerted
-to the following Lobste.rs thread containing [responses from one of the Suckless
-folk](https://lobste.rs/s/kpuj8p/why_i_use_suckless_tools#c_4g2lqi) (username
-"FRIGN"). From the responses in this thread, I can no longer say that the
-Suckless folk were espousing far-right rhetoric or partaking in neo-nazi-like
-activities. As it turns out, at least from the responses in that thread, there
-was nothing political behind the torch march and the use of "Cultural Marxism"
-was taken out of context and the word was probably misused.<br><br> We can still
-call out the use of "Wolfsschanze" as the name of the mail server is in bad
-taste and is offensive considering [where the term comes
-from](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf's_Lair), but it is hardly evidence that
-they are "literal neo-Nazis."<br><br> The people who responded on the Fediverse
-I think were ultimately right, the evidence here is largely circumstantial and I
-was mistaken in drawing the conclusions that I did. I am sorry for that.<br><br>
-I have since moved the redacted text to its own page so you can view what I was
-wrong about on this [page of
-removals](/blog/switching-to-alacritty-removals.md). It was making this post
-hard to read and, since none of the non-technical stuff was true, this post
-should just be about the technical reasons for my switch.</p>
+Fediverse](https://pleroma.paritybit.ca/notice/9xQZNCVzQRiZdtxoeG), I was
+alerted to the following Lobste.rs thread containing [responses from one of the
+Suckless folk](https://lobste.rs/s/kpuj8p/why_i_use_suckless_tools#c_4g2lqi)
+(username "FRIGN").<br><br>I have since moved the redacted text to its own page
+so you can view what I was wrong about on this [page of
+removals](/blog/switching-to-alacritty-removals). I decided to move the stuff
+because it was making this post hard to read and, since none of the
+non-technical stuff was true, this post should just be about the technical
+reasons for my switch.</p>
I've been a pretty happy user of St, the Simple Terminal from Suckless for quite
a few months now but a few annoying issues with it have tempted me to switch.
@@ -51,23 +41,24 @@ itself was a pain, Kitty felt like it took too long to load coming from St's
bring in extra libraries and dependencies which I didn't want.
The only things I've noticed that I would consider inferior about Alacritty is
-that each terminal window uses about 90M of RAM compared to St's ~14-17M and it
-still feels noticeably slower to launch. I'd estimate it takes Alacritty about
-twice as long to launch as St (somewhere in the ballpark of 200-300ms) but I
-don't have a great way of measuring it. The size of the Alacritty binary is 41M
-whereas the size of the St binary is 104K—a significant increase, but ultimately
-meaningless when you consider the size of contemporary storage. Also, Alacritty
-is configured with YAML which is a very annoying configuration format because
-it's white space sensitive (like Python).
+that each terminal window uses about 30-40M of RAM (RES minus SHR) compared to
+St's 4-5M and it still feels noticeably slower to launch. I'd estimate it
+takes Alacritty about twice as long to launch as St (somewhere in the ballpark
+of 200-300ms) but I don't have a great way of measuring it. The size of the
+Alacritty binary is 41M whereas the size of the St binary is 104K—a significant
+increase, but ultimately meaningless when you consider the size of contemporary
+storage. Also, Alacritty is configured with YAML which is a very annoying
+configuration format because it's white space sensitive (like Python).
The technical advantages Alacritty does have over St is its support of colour
eomji without the [libxft-bgra
patch](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxft/-/merge_requests/1) and
the ability to properly make use of the `Delete` key without needing to set `set
enable-keypad on` in my `inputrc` (which didn't even work on remote machines
-over SSH). Both of these workarounds are needed because Suckless refuses to
-patch what are technically flaws in different programs—libxft and bash/ssh
-respectively.
+over SSH). Both of these workarounds are needed because Suckless refuses to
+patch what are technically flaws in different programs—libxft and bash
+respectively (and I could never get St to behave with the Delete key even after
+trying some patches).
As always, my dotfiles can be found in the [dotfiles git
repository](https://git.sr.ht/~jbauer/dotfiles)
