st

To change the default shell for st, edit this line:

static char *shell = "/bin/sh";

Or start st with the desired shell as last argument:

$ st options fish

To change the terminal type, edit this line:

static char *termname = "st-256color";

st will set the TERM variable with the value of termname.

Edit the following line as you prefer:

static char *font = "Liberation Mono:pixelsize=12:antialias=false:autohint=false";

You can also pass the value of the font in the command line:

$ st -f "Liberation Mono:size=12"
$ st -f 'Liberation Mono-12'

Font names can be found with fc-list.

By default the mouse pointer is XC_xterm; which often can be hard to find. To change it to your cursor theme's normal one, edit the following:

static unsigned int mouseshape = XC_left_ptr;

Edit the following lines to set foreground, background, and cursor colors:

unsigned int defaultfg = 7;
unsigned int defaultbg = 0;
static unsigned int defaultcs = 256;

The values refer to the array in the configuration file. You can use the default colors or add yours in #rrggbb:

static const char *colorname[] = {
   	/* 8 normal colors */
       "black",
       "red3",
       "green3",
       "yellow3",
       "blue2",
       "magenta3",
       "cyan3",
       "gray90",
 
       /* 8 bright colors */
       "gray50",
       "red",
       "green",
       "yellow",
       "#5c5cff",
       "magenta",
       "cyan",
       "white",
 
       [255] = 0,
 
       /* more colors can be added after 255 to use with DefaultXX */
       "#cccccc",
       "#eeeeee",
       "#111111",
 };
 
/*
 * Default colors (colorname index)
 * foreground, background, cursor
 */
unsigned int defaultfg = 257;
unsigned int defaultbg = 258;
static unsigned int defaultcs = 256;

Tools exist to facilitate the creation of color palettes. For example terminal.sexy has a set of pre-made ones and exports directly to st's format (see comment on issue 22).

There is a patch for the Solarized color scheme. See https://st.suckless.org/patches/solarized/ to install it.

There are many patches available from the suckless website. To apply a patch, download the diff and apply it with . This alters the default configuration file config.def.h; if you are maintaining your own config.h, copy your configs from config.h into a copy of config.def.h and rename it config.h, then .

To simplify launching st with a decent font (e.g. ) in a desktop environment, you can also create a desktop entry:

~/.local/share/applications/st.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Simple Terminal
GenericName=Terminal
Comment=Suckless terminal emulator for X
Exec=st -t "Simple Terminal" -f "Source Code Pro:style=Semibold:size=12"
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Icon=utilities-terminal
Categories=System;TerminalEmulator;
Keywords=shell;prompt;command;commandline;cmd;

The menu entry will appear as Simple Terminal in the System Tools application list.

Add the following to or if is not working properly in some applications:

set enable-keypad on

If the above does not work with some applications such as IPython using bash, instead, turn off and add the following to your ~/.bashrc, as mentioned in the st FAQ:

printf '\033[?1h\033=' >/dev/tty

Try setting the value of termname in your config.h to and recompiling. And do not set the TERM var in your shell, at least not to as this seems to cause the issue.

Another solution, perhaps a better one, is to have the following lines in your file:

if &term =~ '256color'
    " disable Background Color Erase (BCE) so that color schemes
    " render properly when inside 256-color tmux and GNU screen.
    " see also https://sunaku.github.io/vim-256color-bce.html
    set t_ut=
endif

First, make sure you are not setting and exporting the value of TERM in your ~/.bashrc as mentioned in this thread

Second, make sure the version of you are using is , which is when termguicolors was added.

Finally, add the following to :

set t_8f=^[[38;2;%lu;%lu;%lum        " set foreground color
set t_8b=^[[48;2;%lu;%lu;%lum        " set background color
colorscheme Tomorrow-Night-Eighties
set t_Co=256                         " Enable 256 colors
set termguicolors                    " Enable GUI colors for the terminal to get truecolor
                             

St may crash if you try to load a page with color emojis that have no associated glyph, seen specifically with fonts like , returning something similar to this if run from another terminal:

X Error of failed request:  BadLength (poly request too large or internal Xlib length error)
 Major opcode of failed request:  139 (RENDER)
 Minor opcode of failed request:  20 (RenderAddGlyphs)
 Serial number of failed request:  5118
 Current serial number in output stream:  5209

In order to fix it, simply install for unicode coverage.

Another solution is to install the package. This provides a patched version of libXft which supports color emoji.