st

What is it?

st is the "simple terminal" from suckless.org, the group behind dwm and dmenu. It is a few thousand lines of C with no configuration file at all: you set fonts, colors, and keybindings by editing config.h and recompiling. Patches from the community add features such as scrollback or ligatures one diff at a time.

Why use it?

st exists for people who want to understand and control every line of the software they run. There is no plugin system and no hidden state — what you compile is exactly what runs. It starts instantly, uses almost no memory, and pairs naturally with other suckless tools and a keyboard-driven window manager.

Key features

• Extremely small codebase auditable in an afternoon
• Configuration is C: no runtime config parser or scripting layer
• True color and wide-character support
• Sixel image support in recent versions
• Community patch ecosystem for scrollback, ligatures, and more
• Negligible memory and CPU usage

How it compares

Against Foot, st runs on X11, has no server mode, and requires recompilation for basic changes. Against Alacritty and Kitty there is no GPU acceleration and no tabs or multiplexing. Choose st when minimalism is the point, and a mainstream terminal when it is not.