[Solved] Most Lightweight Terminal Emulator?

shoober420 · 2014-07-23 09:28:17

I'm currently using simple terminal from suckless.org. It is the most lightweight terminal emulator I could find. I use it with a combination of evilwm, the most lightweight window manager (besides tinywm). Does anyone know of a terminal emulator that is more lightweight terminal emulator then simple terminal?

Last edited by shoober420 (2014-07-31 16:55:32)

karol · 2014-07-23 09:52:03

What do you need it for?
Lightweight as in small code base, small footprint or ...?

How does evilwm stack against dwm?

shoober420 · 2014-07-23 09:58:13

Just a small footprint, like least memory usage and resources. I tried out dwm, and I liked it, but tiling window managers don't work well with Steam and certain games. So, I had to go with a stacking window manager. I believe that evilwm uses just a tad bit less resources then dwm, since it includes no bar on the screen like dwm does. I also tried out ratpoison, but that didn't play well with Steam games either, since its also tiling.

Besides that, I love evilwm. Its easily my favorite window manager. I jumped and hopped from window manager to window manager, even trying out twm lol. evilwm has the luxury of switching terminal emulators, and changing the bindings, without having to recompile the source again, like you have to do with dwm. Thats for sure a plus.

Last edited by shoober420 (2014-07-23 10:17:51)

Trilby · 2014-07-23 11:04:09

In all my tests, urxvt has been substantially lower on resource use than st once a couple terminals are open (becuase I use urxvtd/c).

With one terminal window of each urxvt and st, st is only slightly lighter on resource use, but each new terminal window duplicates that resource use with st. With urxvtd/c virtually no more resource use is added for each new instance. So with two windows, urxvt is lighter than st. With three it is much lighter, four even more so ...

Subjectively, urxvt has always also seemed a good bit 'snapier' than st. I love suckless products, but in my experience, st just isn't really ready yet.

Last edited by Trilby (2014-07-23 11:06:28)

karol · 2014-07-23 11:52:27

I saw your post from early 2013 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 7#p1213397 and it may depend on how exactly are you launching your terminals. urxvtd uses 10-40 MB, depending on the weather, I guess.

# ps_mem
 Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used	Program

116.0 KiB +  54.0 KiB = 170.0 KiB	atd
168.0 KiB +  40.5 KiB = 208.5 KiB	gpm
160.0 KiB +  50.5 KiB = 210.5 KiB	acpid
148.0 KiB +  72.5 KiB = 220.5 KiB	vnstatd
192.0 KiB +  77.0 KiB = 269.0 KiB	systemd-resolved
172.0 KiB + 129.5 KiB = 301.5 KiB	xinit
172.0 KiB + 138.5 KiB = 310.5 KiB	dwmst
228.0 KiB + 132.0 KiB = 360.0 KiB	dbus-launch
292.0 KiB + 150.0 KiB = 442.0 KiB	startx
336.0 KiB + 289.0 KiB = 625.0 KiB	dwm
324.0 KiB + 342.0 KiB = 666.0 KiB	su
624.0 KiB +  84.5 KiB = 708.5 KiB	systemd-logind
636.0 KiB +  80.0 KiB = 716.0 KiB	systemd-networkd
936.0 KiB + 135.0 KiB =   1.0 MiB	systemd-udevd
716.0 KiB + 435.5 KiB =   1.1 MiB	(sd-pam)
516.0 KiB + 708.0 KiB =   1.2 MiB	dbus-daemon (2)
820.0 KiB + 417.0 KiB =   1.2 MiB	login
968.0 KiB +   1.3 MiB =   2.3 MiB	systemd (2)
  4.0 MiB + 265.5 KiB =   4.3 MiB	vim
  2.7 MiB +   1.9 MiB =   4.6 MiB	st (2)
  7.5 MiB + 117.0 KiB =   7.6 MiB	systemd-journald
  8.4 MiB +   2.0 MiB =  10.4 MiB	bash (10)
 15.4 MiB +   2.4 MiB =  17.8 MiB	urxvtd
 89.7 MiB +   1.5 MiB =  91.2 MiB	Xorg.bin
246.7 MiB +   5.0 MiB = 251.7 MiB	firefox
---------------------------------
                        399.4 MiB
=================================

I'm starting a thread about st in a moment, so we can discuss it there.

st is painfully slow with scrolling, but it may be because of my old hardware, dwm, fonts or something else. It certainly encourages you to learn vim's movement commands much faster ;-)

th3voic3 · 2014-07-23 13:22:24

shoober420 wrote:

tiling window managers don't work well with Steam and certain games.

What do you mean exactly? Not going fullscreen? There are shortcuts and rules for that. I've been using nothing but tiling WMs for quite some time _and_ I game. If you have any questions...

Trilby · 2014-07-23 13:50:25

As the creator of one tiling WM, I can cofirm that working with some client programs (such as steam, wine, almost all gtk3!) can be much more of a hassle in a tiling WM than in a stacking WM. However, as I creator of a WM, I also would very much like to have any issues reported in (clear) bug reports. Most tilers are small (sometimes one-person) projects. As such the developer(s) only get to test them under a very narrow set of circumstances - we rely on other users telling us when it doesn't work under other circumstances.

I occasionally set up my WM on other computers with very different hardware or configurations - only then do I see a plethora of devestating and embarrasing bugs and think 'why hasn't anyone complained about this before'. If there were complaints, there could be fixes.

ANOKNUSA · 2014-07-23 15:21:39

shoober420 wrote:

I'm currently using simple terminal from suckless.org. It is the most lightweight terminal emulator I could find. I use it with a combination of evilwm, the most lightweight window manager (besides tinywm). Does anyone know of a terminal emulator that is more lightweight terminal emulator then simple terminal?

I know this isn't much of an answer, but it seems simple terminal has been part of the suckless agenda for a very long time. I'm pretty sure that if there were a graphical terminal simpler than st, the folks at suckless would have either adopted it or worked to outdo it by now.

As a side note, I usually run Steam games in windowed mode in dwm with the monocle layout, and just hide the statusbar (I have the noborder patch applied). Running games fullscreen in i3 works flawlessly.

GermanyChris · 2014-07-23 16:39:42

While probably not as light as some I like LXTerminal.

shoober420 · 2014-07-24 04:01:43

th3voic3 wrote:

What do you mean exactly? Not going fullscreen? There are shortcuts and rules for that. I've been using nothing but tiling WMs for quite some time _and_ I game. If you have any questions...

Yes, some games won't go fullscreen unless you use a -windowed launch option. Although I did use this for a while when I was using ratpoison and dwm, I discovered evilwm, which uses a tad bit less resources then ratpoison and dwm and is more compatible with Steam.

ANOKNUSA wrote:

As a side note, I usually run Steam games in windowed mode in dwm with the monocle layout, and just hide the statusbar (I have the noborder patch applied). Running games fullscreen in i3 works flawlessly.

I was doing the same while using ratpoison. I have seen posts on the Valve github about i3 not working correctly with Steam. I just think all tiling window managers don't work well with Steam. I'm very happy with evilwm though. Its the lightest of the bunch (besides tinywm) and Steam plays nice with it.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-07-23 09:28:17

[Solved] Most Lightweight Terminal Emulator?

#2 2014-07-23 09:52:03

Re: [Solved] Most Lightweight Terminal Emulator?

#3 2014-07-23 09:58:13

Re: [Solved] Most Lightweight Terminal Emulator?

#4 2014-07-23 11:04:09

Re: [Solved] Most Lightweight Terminal Emulator?

#5 2014-07-23 11:52:27

Re: [Solved] Most Lightweight Terminal Emulator?

#6 2014-07-23 13:22:24

Re: [Solved] Most Lightweight Terminal Emulator?

#7 2014-07-23 13:50:25

Re: [Solved] Most Lightweight Terminal Emulator?

#8 2014-07-23 15:21:39

Re: [Solved] Most Lightweight Terminal Emulator?

#9 2014-07-23 16:39:42

Re: [Solved] Most Lightweight Terminal Emulator?

#10 2014-07-24 04:01:43

Re: [Solved] Most Lightweight Terminal Emulator?

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