I've written a patch which drastically improves st's performance in interactive console applications, like htop, vim or alsamixer. However, catting /dev/urandom is actually worsened , because of XCopyArea overhead. The method used was actually to make st dumber. Rather than doing any accounting, in every function which updates the terminal model, I make an analogous X11 call, to update the pixmap. The calls to draw are then replaced by xrefresh, which simply XCopyArea's the pixmap onto the window.
Ideally, I could detect whether the process was bursting, then disable all the X calls, and use the naive draw to fill the window once every 40ms. (or, if that's too slow, draw directly on the window, and stop when I run out of time) The patch also reworks the Selection code, both for clarity, and to let you see what you select as you drag your mouse around. The patch is here: galos.no-ip.org/st-0.1.1-fast.diff David Galos
