st emoji support with libXft BGRA glyph patch

The Problem st crashes whenever an emoji needs to be rendered. It turns out to be an issue with the underlying font rendering library libXft. libXft is the client side font rendering library, using libfreetype, libX11, and the X Render extension to display anti-aliased text. The Solution In its current offical mainline form libXft does not support rendering images. A patch by Maxime Coste exists to add support for BGRA glyphs and scaling, effectively enabling emoji rendering support. ...

December 7, 2021 · 2 min

Suckless programs

The suckless project values simplicity, clarity and frugality in software. Our philosophy is about keeping things simple, minimal and usable. We believe this should become the mainstream philosophy in the IT sector. As a user of most of their programs including the infamous dwm (a tiling window manager), dmenu (launcher), st (terminal emulator) and others tools, I can attest to benefits of using minimal and efficient software. Patching Programs are customised by patching the C source code. However, unlike typical open source projects, suckless source code is quite readable and hackable, a by-product of the philosophy. ...

April 8, 2020 · 3 min

Arch Linux

After witnessing insane minimalism paired with a tiler (tiling window manager), knew it was my time to take the pilgrimage to Arch Linux. Some characteristics that make Arch unique: The Arch Way embody the principles behind Arch Linux; simplicity, modernity, pragmatism, user centrality and versatility. Forces one to build the system up by hand. This encourages you to question the role of each component of the system, and available options to satisfy that component (e.g. the terminal emulator). The result is a highly tailored and minimal system that meets precisely your needs. Practical and pragmatic documentation. The Arch Wiki is the gold standard when it comes to documentation. The Arch User Repository (AUR) is a treasure chest of pre-packaged useful recent software. Somehow every program I’ve ever needed has been available on AUR. Rolling upgrades. Arch was born in 2001, when Canadian programmer Judd Vinet, inspired by the elegance of systems such as Slackware and the BSD’s, set out to build his own distro based on a similar ethos. The first formal release, 0.1, dropped on March 11, 2002. ...

April 6, 2019 · 19 min