The two terminals in your screenshots are using different fonts.

Notice the dotted zero in the top terminal (xfce4-terminal) and no dotted zero in the bottom terminal (st).

I suspect st is not recognizing the font name you're giving it, and to fix it you have to play around with different ways to telling st the name of your font. What worked for me for the Inconsolata font was "st -f Inconsolata" or "st -f Inconsolata:size=11".

> rxvt is super buggy

Which one are you using? AFAIK urxvt is the only maintained fork. I could be wrong.

> I would report this to the author but I don't see any way to do so.

http://suckless.org/community

You'll probably get yelled at to fix your font config if you report it, though.

They're pretty big on "This is not #support. Post patch or GTFO" last I was there.

I recommend termite, it is not bloated and quite simple, best composed with tiling window manager: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Termite

No screens there because there isn't anything to screen, it is just plain console without any GUI (supports scroll-back)

st does this when you don't give it the right font path and config. There is one compiled in, and that's what it's using if you aren't passing a font when you start it. Right now, whatever font it's trying to use doesn't exist, and your screenshot is a typical result of that.

In config.h:

  /*
   * appearance
   *
   * font: see http://freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html
   */
   static char font[] = "Liberation Mono:pixelsize=12:antialias=true:autohint=true";

Try to specify font name in this format.

Try looking for the actual font name with "fc-list | grep -i source", maybe it is not what you're expecting.

A few months ago I was having trouble with getting some TTF BIOS fonts recognized by urxvt and fc-list made me realize that I should've escaped a couple dashes in the font name.

> I would report this to the author but I don't see any way to do so.

Godspeed, I moved away from all suckless software because the developers are all massive jerks. They'll ignore your bug reports unless you spend an unreasonable amount of time doing intricate debugging, and if you refuse they'll be sure to remember your name and act hostile if you ever go back into their IRC. That's been my experience with Surf and something else (I don't remember what, but it wasn't st) anyways.

Well to be fair, it's in their name: suck less. It might be less, but it definitely sucks :-)