cc @viric @andsild

I have mixed feelings about this. There are a ton of patches to st and it might not make sense to add all of them.

Currently you should be able to override this in an overlay. Maybe we just need documentation explaining how to do this with st?

Why add an overlay when you can just add an option? Personally, I like this.

Well currently I would say discovering the patches directly through suckless.org is much easier than discovering the package arguments. We definitely can't list all of the patches at http://st.suckless.org/patches/ but we can show users how to apply any on their own. You can do something like this fairly easily:

let
  patch-dir = ./my-st-patch-dir;
in self: super: {
  st = super.st.override (old: {
    patches = (old.patches or []) ++ [
      (builtins.fetchurl http://st.suckless.org/patches/right_click_to_plumb/right_click_to_plumb.diff)
      ./my-custom-mod.patch
    ] ++ (map (file: patch-dir + ./. + file) (builtins.attrNames (builtins.readDir patch-dir)));
  });
}

If we ever get something like the module system for package flags having these here this might be worth it. But right now I would much prefer better documentation to obscure flags.

Just discovered overlays thanks to you :) .
Here is what I was able to write:

self: super:

let
  stVersion = "0.8.1";

  alphaPatch = self.fetchpatch {
    name = "st-alpha.patch";
    url = "https://st.suckless.org/patches/alpha/st-alpha-${stVersion}.diff";
    sha256 = "18iw0bzmagcchlf5m5dfvdryn47kpdbcs1j1waq8vl1w2wvcg5al";
  };

  clipboardPatch = self.fetchpatch {
    name = "clipboard.patch";
    url = "https://st.suckless.org/patches/clipboard/st-clipboard-${stVersion}.diff";
    sha256 = "0gdjgzg2a98fph4sn4w210p39401mm4imkrllfyhc836bjyhi5pc";
  };

  hidecursorPatch = self.fetchpatch {
    name = "hidecursor.patch";
    url = "https://st.suckless.org/patches/hidecursor/st-hidecursor-${stVersion}.diff";
    sha256 = "02b4h375c2vd79f7cagki5fnx1ipygywlxn25c62kg529d7zfck0";
  };

in
{
  st = super.st.override {
    conf = import ./st.nix;
    patches = [alphaPatch clipboardPatch hidecursorPatch];
  };
}

It seems to work on my side. Can this be improved ? Is there any pattern we could extract and integrate into st derivation to make it easier for users to add patches ?