Programs that Suck Less! suckless

all right hello Zoomers so I want to talk in this video about suck less programs not one particular suck less program but suck lists in general because there are a lot of misconceptions out there and I just want people you know in order to really get what you want out of suck less programs you have to wrap your mind around them now what are sockless part actually we should talk about what suck less actually is because I know there are many people watching my channel who don't know despite the fact that I've done many videos on their self suck list is a kind of cabal of programmers and they're dedicated to very minimalist bloat free software everything is supposed to be not just few lines of code but very well-written very economical not just for speed but also ignoring you know getting rid of bugs getting rid of the potentiality for bugs and you know you can't really mess up something that's very small that's the idea and suck lists I think builds off a lot of the general idea of the UNIX philosophy and stuff like that but that's not for this video so suck lists has put out a whole bunch of really interesting programs now you can they of course have DWM which is their window manager st which is their terminal Cerf which is their browser and then they have a gajillion tools many many of which i've done videos on i know i've done videos on demon you a gajillion ones on that scent for making presentations that's a great program I definitely encourage you to check these out but some people have some concerns because suck less programs are usually very different from what you're familiar with now if you're a novice user they'll be a little confusing but even worse if you're a non novice user who knows a lot about how you Linux programs usually work you might be a little I don't know discombobulated by suck less programs um now recently I I do this video sorta because I I noticed that another channel on YouTube this is distro tube the guy there Derek said that he is going to use suck less utilities as a challenge just just sort of for fun and he talked about some of the problems that he has I guess the the bumps he's run into and of course people in the comments talked about the same things and I just want to give some people some hints about things so first off the biggest the biggest the people complain about in suck less programs is that they don't have config files in the way that you usually think about them you can't open up if you have st you can't open up your str c and change your configs one of the route i mean there are different reasons that suck less programs don't have config files because you know if you oh you know you run your program and it's reading an extra file that's bloat it's also a place where bugs or errors or user error can come from so suck less programs are usually constructed in such a way actually I'll CD into one of my suck list programs st this is my build of st and usually clean usually they will have a config file this config dot h and this is where you make all the changes to and then you recompile the entire program and now your changes are active so that seems to a lot of new users like really difficult because oh man what i have to recompile the program every single time i use it now first off yeah that's true you can patch the ability for you know my st my terminal although it's a succulence program it happens to read my ex resources file I've patched that into it but if you are just annoyed by the prospect of recompiling things because you have to oft CD to the directory and I have to sudo make install it and that takes time you don't have to do that you've got it kids you're using Linux or whatever you can automate everything what you can do let's open up our vem our seas I know we're all venues errs or at least people who know how to use some kind of extensible text editor I'm not going to name any other ones but one thing you can do for example in vim is let's say you can tell them whenever I'm editing a config dot H file recompile this program so actually let's do this so I'm gonna actually copy this and then we'll so recompile subtlest programs automatically so in them of course there are these auto commands and you can have your auto commands run buff right post just means after you save a file run this command it runs whenever your file is named like this I'm gonna get rid of this I'm gonna rename this to config dot H boy config dot dev H and the thing I'm gonna run is going to be sudo make install just save that in vim you never have to manually compile a succubus program again let's let's do that real time kids so I'm gonna open up well up so you can have whatever what sort of whatever alias opens up your config file make whatever changes you want save it and look look down at the bottom it's actually running automatically so you don't have to worry about that at all it's not like it takes any time for these programs to recompile so you don't have to worry about that ok let's get rid of that so I don't do that myself but that's just if you're come if that's the thing you're complaining about don't worry about it just put it in vim put it in whatever else or even just have a script automatically do it if you don't if you don't want to deal with it so that's one thing now another thing is that one so one thing that's difficult about suc list programs to even talk about is that first off a lot of their tools like for example D menu now if you've watched my channel I do so many things for D menu I mount USB drives with D menu I insert emojis with D menu I run commands with DD menu but if you really ask someone what D menu is well it's a program that takes standard input and gives you options based on each line it's a program that's hard to understand because suck less programs are often designed not to do anything instead they work well with how you use something else and that's the one thing you need to understand about all these programs another one this one I don't use but it is you know worth looking at tabbed so Sullust programs like for example surf the browser or st their terminal do not have tabs in fact I think it's really I understand tabs and browsers but tabs and terminals that just confuses me but if you want to have tabs instead of having separate you know tab software tab code in each one of the suck list programs for running tabs there is one program called tabbed where you can basically embed your you know run your program so it's embed in tab embedded in tabbed and then you can run multiple instances on top of each other so that's the sort of suck less mentality where you have these features but the features are not all in one program they're decentralized a you know in different parts of the system that sometimes means a little bit of creativity when you're putting together a system but again I mean as I said you know D menu for example mountain on mounds drives for me it you know detects what displays I have and I can choose which one I you want to use you can do anything with these programs when you really get into mindset one best example of this is actually surf the browser now I don't use surf as you can see from here I'm just using Firefox here but a lot of people misunderstand surf because if you run it actually I'll run surf run it on my own website so this is what surf looks like it's just the window you know it it shows your browser you can click on stuff whatever but the thing that people don't often understand about these suck less utilities is you're not supposed to surf is not an equivalent of Firefox it's not supposed it's not a browser in the same way Firefox's Firefox again has all these tabs it has bookmarks it has all these other things that are part of its program but in if you have the suck list mentality how you're supposed to think of this is say well really my web browser is a decentralized mesh and what I mean by that is you know let's say instead of having keeping all my bookmarks in Firefox and saving them in Firefox's you know default you know whatever it is bookmark saving thingy instead let's say I just have a text file on my computer and I list out all the sites that I like that's my bookmark file and then I can take that text input send it to D menu to present me a menu in my surf instance and that will give me you know a bookmark menu effectively if I just press a key binding that I bind oh look now I have a bookmark menu or now I can change my you know I could add suggestions from that or something like that so a lot of people will install suck list programs and they'll say it doesn't do what Firefox does or doesn't do bla bla bla bla and it's like that that's the point now I'm not saying none of these programs know sup list program is a drop-in and replacement for the the programs you're used to using well I mean some are frankly but some are - like surf for example but once you get the suck list mentality of again like viewing it not as you don't think of this as a browser in the same way that Netscape was a browser now that was a good browser but think of it in terms of this is just a window that shows some URL I can send it a URL from my terminal or from some script or from something else and it's nice and easy like that and we keep in mind I mean even this this program doesn't even have you know in order to type in a you use the URL bar it uses de menu as a URL bar doesn't even you know everything is decentralized everything's a slightly different program so the takeaway I think should be that if you're experimenting with suck list programs just bear in mind they're different I mean the entire paradigm is different your mindset has to be different when you're approaching them they're not equivalent but suck less programs have this great tendency to be so manipulatable you can do so many things with it I mean you know look at this let's select emojis wow this is fantastic get all the emojis you want insert them you know there once you get in that mentality there are so many things that you can do with them that it really just blows everything else away um but anyway so that's all I wanted to do nothing nothing really huge but just stop and think before you get mad at a program you're trying just stop and think about what it's actually doing and what kind of things you can you know if you are willing to step out of your comfort zone I guarantee you it will be much more comfortable it so anyway that's about it and I will see you guys next time

Channel: Luke Smith

Views: 133,806

Keywords: gnu, linux, tutorial, introduction, unix, philosophy, minimal, minimalism, minimalst, computer, programming, program, i3, i3-gaps, vim, emacs, vi, tex, latex, markdown, git, github, groff, arch, gentoo, distro, distribution, distrobution, ubuntu, fedora, thinkpad, floss, free, open, source, foss, software, suckless, recompile, make, install, sudo, tips, hints, surf, dwm, st, dmenu

Id: 3C6saSpX4KQ

Length: 11min 14sec (674 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 23 2019