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Comment by cm3 | Hacker News Reader

xmonad has a built-in (xmonad-contrib) program launcher prompt that doesn't require an extra program and is more comfortable to use. There are other prompts included as well and you can build more prompts in Haskell. st used more memory and was slower than xterm last time I tried. I try using urxvt or st and only xterm works without problems or slowdowns. We may be using it in different ways and exercise different features of the terminal emulators :).

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> st used more memory and was slower than xterm

Since st has no scroll buffer, theoretically it's impossible for st to consume more memory than xterm. If st does eat up more, it should be because of its screen buffer, whose size is decided by the size of its window.

Also, yes, the rendering portion of st is not the fastest. I know it pretty well because I implemented it like an year ago. It has been improved, but it's still kinda hacky due to lack of proper Unicode layout engine (or normalization). And what makes things worse is that existing layout engines(ICU, harfbuzz, etc) are just "sucks" for suckles community, while making a new one is not feasible AFAIK.

I don't understand what you're saying about the three different buffers and if you mean that there's a hidden buffer I don't see in xterm but which is used somewhere else in the stack.

I exclusively use bitmap fonts in terminals and editors for crisp and clear text and cannot get bitmap fonts to work in st config.h anymore.

> xmonad has a built-in (xmonad-contrib) program launcher prompt

kinda-sorta...

http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Prompt-A...

doesn't do exactly what i want... i'm looking for something more like this

http://lpaste.net/145311

, except the completions list and tab stuff don't work

aaand, i have to get back to "web" technologies :)

This is your easy Mod-p replacement: http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Prompt-S...

You can give it something else than defaultXPConfig to customize the look and completion behavior: http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Prompt.h...

I just switched from dmenu to the contrib prompt, only thing to look out for is that the searchPredicate function of the XPConfig doesn't actually seem to do anything.

Setting:

  searchPredicate :: String -> String -> Bool
  searchPredicate = \_ _ -> False

seems to make no difference.

And the default is:

  searchPredicate = isPrefixOf

Patching and recompiling with this patch[1] mentioned here[2] seems to fix the issue.

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/attachmentText?id=39... [2]: https://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/detail?id=393

Care to resubmit that patch at https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad-contrib? That way it can be part of the 0.12 release.

urxvt with the daemon (urxvtd & urxvtc) is blazing fast, in my experience. That said, it's not fun when all my terminals suddenly freeze (happens to me once a year, roughly).

It's faster to start for sure. I don't doubt that it's faster for you, since many users praise urxvt's speed over xterm. It just hasn't been the case for me.

> you can build more prompts in Haskell

Trying to customize xmonad is why I use i3 now.

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