INSTALL.md

Installing

1. Overview
2. Requirements
   1. Running
   2. Building
3. Arch Linux
4. Other
   1. Setup
   2. Options
   3. Release build
      1. Size optimized
      2. Performance optimized, non-PGO
      3. Performance optimized, PGO
         1. Partial PGO
         2. Full PGO
         3. Use the generated PGO data
      4. Profile Guided Optimization
   4. Debug build
   5. Running the new build

Overview

foot makes use of a couple of libraries I have developed: tllist and fcft. As such, they will most likely not have been installed already. You can either install them as system libraries or build them as subprojects in foot.

When building foot, they will first be searched for as system libraries. If found, foot will link dynamically against them. If not found, meson will attempt to download and build them as subprojects.

Requirements

Running

• fontconfig
• freetype
• pixman
• wayland (client and cursor libraries)
• xkbcommon
• fcft ¹

If you are packaging foot, you may also want to consider adding the following optional dependencies:

• libnotify: desktop notifications by default uses notify-send.
• xdg-utils: URLs are by default launched with xdg-open.
• bash-completion: If you want completion for positional arguments.

Building

In addition to the dev variant of the packages above, you need:

• meson
• ninja
• wayland protocols
• ncurses (needed to generate terminfo)
• scdoc (for man page generation)
• llvm (for PGO builds with Clang)
• tllist ¹

A note on compilers; in general, foot runs much faster when compiled with gcc instead of clang. A profile-guided gcc build can be more than twice as fast as a clang build.

Note GCC 10.1 has a performance regression that severely affects foot when doing PGO builds and building with -O2; it is about 30-40% slower compared to GCC 9.3.

The work around is simple: make sure you build with -O3. This is the default with meson --buildtype=release, but e.g. makepkg can override it (makepkg uses -O2 by default).

Arch Linux

Install from AUR:

• foot + foot-terminfo
• foot-git + foot-terminfo-git

Or use makepkg to build the bundled PKGBUILD (run makepkg in the source root directory).

Unlike the AUR packages, the bundled PKGBUILD requires tllist and fcft to be installed as system libraries. If you do not want this, please edit the PKGBUILD file, or install manually (see Other below).

Note that it will do a profiling-guided build, and that this requires a running wayland session since it needs to run an intermediate build of foot.

Other

Foot uses meson. If you are unfamiliar with it, the official tutorial might be a good starting point.

I also recommend taking a look at the bundled Arch PKGBUILD file, to see how it builds foot. Especially so if you intend to install a release build of foot, in which case you might be interested in the compiler flags used there.

Setup

To build, first, create a build directory, and switch to it:

mkdir -p bld/release && cd bld/release

Options

Available compile-time options:

Option	Type	Default	Description	Extra dependencies
-Dime	bool	true	Enables IME support	None
-Dterminfo	feature	auto	Build terminfo	tic (ncurses)

Release build

Below are instructions for building foot either size optimized, performance optimized, or performance optimized using PGO.

PGO - Profile Guided Optimization - is a way to optimize a program better than -O3 can, and is done by compiling foot twice: first to generate an instrumented version which is used to run a payload that exercises the performance critical parts of foot, and then a second time to rebuild foot using the generated profiling data to guide optimization.

In addition to being faster, PGO builds also tend to be smaller than regular -O3 builds.

Size optimized

To optimize for size (i.e. produce a small binary):

export CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -Os"
meson --buildtype=release --prefix=/usr -Db_lto=true ../..
ninja
ninja test
ninja install

Performance optimized, non-PGO

To do a regular, non-PGO build optimized for performance:

export CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -O3"
meson --buildtype=release --prefix=/usr -Db_lto=true ../..
ninja
ninja test
ninja install

Use -O2 instead of -O3 if you prefer a slightly smaller (and slower!) binary.

Performance optimized, PGO

First, configure the build directory:

export CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -O3"
meson --buildtype=release --prefix=/usr -Db_lto=true ../..

It is very important -O3 is being used here, as GCC-10.1.x and later have a regression where PGO with -O2 is much slower.

Clang users must add -Wno-ignored-optimization-argument to CFLAGS.

Then, tell meson we want to generate profiling data, and build:

meson configure -Db_pgo=generate
ninja
ninja test

Next, we need to actually generate the profiling data.

There are two ways to do this: a partial PGO build using a PGO helper binary, or a full PGO build by running the real foot binary. The latter has slightly better results (i.e. results in a faster binary), but must be run in a Wayland session.

A full PGO build also tends to be smaller than a partial build.

Partial PGO

This method uses a PGO helper binary that links against the VT parser only. It is similar to a mock test; it instantiates a dummy terminal instance and then directly calls the VT parser with stimuli.

It explicitly does not include the Wayland backend and as such, it does not require a running Wayland session. The downside is that not all code paths in foot is exercised. In particular, the rendering code is not. As a result, the final binary built using this method is slightly slower than when doing a full PGO build.

We will use the pgo binary along with input corpus generated by scripts/generate-alt-random-writes.py:

./footclient --version
./foot --version
tmp_file=$(mktemp)
../../scripts/generate-alt-random-writes \
    --rows=67 \
    --cols=135 \
    --scroll \
    --scroll-region \
    --colors-regular \
    --colors-bright \
    --colors-256 \
    --colors-rgb \
    --attr-bold \
    --attr-italic \
    --attr-underline \
    --sixel \
    ${tmp_file}
./pgo ${tmp_file} ${tmp_file} ${tmp_file}
rm ${tmp_file}

The first step, running ./foot --version and ./footclient --version might seem unnecessary, but is needed to ensure we have some profiling data for functions not covered by the PGO helper binary. Without this, the final link phase will fail.

The snippet above then creates an (empty) temporary file. Then, it runs a script that generates random escape sequences (if you cat ${tmp_file} in a terminal, you’ll see random colored characters all over the screen). Finally, we feed the randomly generated escape sequences to the PGO helper. This is what generates the profiling data used in the next step.

You are now ready to use the generated PGO data.

Full PGO

This method requires a running Wayland session.

We will use the script scripts/generate-alt-random-writes.py:

./footclient --version
foot_tmp_file=$(mktemp)
./foot --config=/dev/null --term=xterm sh -c "<path-to-generate-alt-random-writes.py> --scroll --scroll-region --colors-regular --colors-bright --colors-256 --colors-rgb --attr-bold --attr-italic --attr-underline --sixel ${foot_tmp_file} && cat ${foot_tmp_file}"
rm ${foot_tmp_file}

You should see a foot window open up, with random colored text. The window should close after ~1-2s.

The first step, ./footclient --version might seem unnecessary, but is needed to ensure we have some profiling data for footclient. Without this, the final link phase will fail.

Use the generated PGO data

Now that we have generated PGO data, we need to rebuild foot. This time telling meson (and ultimately gcc/clang) to use the PGO data.

If using Clang, now do (this requires llvm to have been installed):

llvm-profdata merge default_*profraw --output=default.profdata

Next, tell meson to use the profile data we just generated, and rebuild:

meson configure -Db_pgo=use
ninja
ninja test

Continue reading in Running the new build

Debug build

meson --buildtype=debug ../..
ninja
ninja test

Running the new build

You can now run it directly from the build directory:

./foot

But note that it will default to TERM=foot, and that this terminfo has not been installed yet. However, most things should work with the xterm-256color terminfo:

./foot --term xterm-256color

But, I recommend you install the foot and foot-direct terminfo files. You can either copy them manually (typically to /usr/share/terminfo/f - but this depends on the distro), or just install everything:

ninja install

Footnotes

1. can also be built as subprojects, in which case they are statically linked. ↩ ↩²