I tried their window manager out once and the only way to add some functionality through plugins is …

> This is an odd thing to bring up though because that's quite literally the only way to make any changes to suckless software, editing source code in C. You're ignoring the part where the tools are often a fraction of the size and complexity of similar tools. I can go through a 5K SLOC program and understand it relatively quickly, even if I'm unfamiliar with the programming language or APIs. I can't do the same for programs 10 or 100x that size. The code is also well structured and documented IME, so changing it is not that difficult. In practice, once you configure the program to your liking, you rarely have to recompile it again. Like I said, I'm using a 5 year old st binary that still works exactly how I want it to. Maintaining a set of patches is usually not a major problem either. The patches are often small, and conflicts are rare, but easily fixable. Again, in my experience, whic…

Sometimes, I have had to change software (although not from suckless, since I do not use any of their software) by modifying and recompiling it, to do what I wanted. > There's nothing simple or "unbloated" about having to recompile a piece of software every time you want to make what should really be a runtime user configuration, and it makes an entire compiler toolchain effectively a dependency for even the most trivial config change. It is true, but depending on the software, sometimes this is acceptable. (Some of the internet server software that I wrote (such as scorpiond) are configured in this way, in order to take advantage of compiler optimizations.) For some other programs, some things will have to be configured at compile time (mostly things that probably don't need to be changed after making a package of this program in some package manager), although most things can be config…

Not when you want to write your own patches, it isn't. I think the design of DWM could be improved to make patching easier, but it was a revelation to me when I discovered it: for the first time in my life, I was using open source software that was actually designed to be extended.