2025-05-27 On suckless tools
So, I guess you already heard of the suckless tools and their
accompanying philosophy[1]. The worst enemy of the suckless people is
"bloat" so they keep these programs as simple as possible even
imposing arbitrary limit on the line count. I've known these tools
for years but recently they started to turn up again in my Youtube
feed (hello, Luke Smith).
I think the most well known suckless program is dwm[2], a tiling window
manager, and of course I hopped onto it multiple times to give it a
shot. I have two things to say about this:
Firstly, I think it is kind of amusing to deliver a bare-bones program
like dwm, which is barely usable because it has only a limited feature
set, just to then re-add said features yourself via patches. Although
the patching process is very easy I got a conflict when trying to add
multiple patches. I couldn't be arsed to resolve this so I guess I
got filtered. I'm just not "elitist" enough.
Secondly, a little anecdote. The last time I tried dwm (without
patches) I got a strange bug. When visiting a certain website my
whole X session crashed!!!11 Turns out the website title contained an
emoji which dwm just couldn't handle. Kind of deal breaker isn't it?
So after duckduckgoing the problem I found a thread from 2019! on the
suckless mailing list concerning this problem. Here it is argued that
this is caused by the Xft library which dwm depends on. One of the
developers writes:
Xft needs to fix this known bug and/or we need to switch from
Xft. The only one looking bad is Xft here (and having color emojis
in fonts). [3]
I think this is really remarkable. Imagine for a moment that you went
into a bakery and bought a loaf of bread. When you eat the bread it
is full of glass shards so you go back into the shop to confront the
baker. The baker then says: Well, this is not my fault. The wheat
from our supplier already comes mixed with glass shards.
I know these two situations are not really comparable but nonetheless
the absurdity of the argumentation around this bug, which of course
can be remedied by applying a make-shift patch, is very entertaining to
me.
If I learned one thing from this experience it is that suckless kinda
sucks. There were times in my life where I really enjoyed tinkering
with Linux stuff but not anymore. Even fiddling with my beloved Emacs
became so annoying that I use it just for editing texts these days
(can you imagine?).
Footnotes
~~~~~~~~~
[1]
https://suckless.org/philosophy/
[2]
https://dwm.suckless.org/
[3]
https://lists.suckless.org/dev/1901/33128.html
