4 ms·

Ultimate Writer: An Open Digital Typewriter

73 points by djsumdog 8y ago

bwestergard 8y ago
A no-frills e-ink bash terminal machine would be a delight for working through a programming book in the park. If this were more portable and got longer battery life (24+ hours) I would pay a few hundred dollars for it.
- mdonahoe 8y ago
  yes please. I really want to use vim in the sun
- CarVac 8y ago
  I'd love to have one too.
- GorgeRonde 8y ago
  I own a Yotaphone 2 which is a a dual-screen android phone. The e-ink screen is able to display the whole OS and not just some widgets.
smacktoward 8y ago
I guess you know you're getting old when you start seeing people "invent" things that you saw people using every day when you were young. > I came to think, maybe we should create a digital typewriter giving us the best of the two worlds. What the author calls a "digital typewriter" is what originally used to be known as a "word processor" -- a standalone, dedicated digital device with a keyboard and a (typically small, typically monochrome) display, running built-in software for editing text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_(electronic_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_(electronic_dev... You would type on the keyboard and your words would appear on the display, where you could go back and edit typos and such if you needed to. The display usually only showed a few lines of text, but you could scroll up and down through the entire document using the screen as a buffer. Your work would be then persisted to some storage medium, often in later models a floppy disk. It wasn't WYSIWYG, but it was a vast advance over mechanical typewriters, for all the reasons the article mentions. These devices had their heyday from the '60s through the '80s. They were eventually rendered obsolete by the arrival of the inexpensive general-purpose personal computer. All the functions of the word processor could be provided on the PC via software, and the PC's bigger, more colorful display made it a better environment for doing those things anyway. The programs people used to do word processing on PCs came to be known as "word processors" themselves. Eventually the dedicated devices stopped being made, and I guess over time people just forgot that there was once a word processor that wasn't software. My mother was a writer, and I have many childhood memories of her sitting at her treasured Brother word processor. So perhaps I have more reason to remember the hardware word processor than most people do.
- Semiapies 8y ago
  And they keep reinventing it. I don't see a year going by without a Kickstarter or the like for one of these things. https://getfreewrite.com https://getfreewrite.com Further, we've had oodles of minimalist/cut down/focused/sensory deprivation gimmick word processors for the last twenty years, all essentially recreating the UI of every single DOS word processing program. And yet, whenever professional writers talk about what they write with, it's almost always MS Word or some crappy screenplay program. Not some minimalist program, not some special piece of hardware, just the standard tool available. (Occasionally, their preferred text editor if they're a geek - just another standard tool.) Decades and centuries ago, they used word processors or typewriters or pen and paper because those were the available, standard tools. Because a tool is just something to aid the act of writing, not a device for squeezing it out of you when you have nothing to say.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    One of the issues is that, as soon as you get into any collaboration or editing, you have to move the document into some common format anyway. In which case, I usually find that I might as well have started there in the first place. I actually like Scrivener on the Mac for bigger projects. But given that, at some point, I'm going to have to switch to another tool, it's usually not worth using for the first draft.
    - Semiapies 8y ago
      You gotta do what works, yeah. Some people rig up stuff to make their tools work with others, others don't find that worth the effort; ultimately a personal call.
  - dieterrams 8y ago
    You’re rather dismissive and uncharitable, aren’t you?
    - Semiapies 8y ago
      Dismissive, yes. Buying various tools for a craft does not make you a craftsman. You only become a writer by writing, not by buying silly hipster products "for writers". And there have always been such products aimed at people who don't actually write. Uncharitable, no. Some people want to "be a writer" for various reasons without actually wanting to write. It's anything from an imposed expectation (common in "creative" subcultures) to an affectation. If playing at being a writer makes them happy, that's harmless. There's no stolen valor in pretending to be a writer. But, some of the people buying these sorts of products could be writers. Very often, they buy these products out of fear, that being one of the major factors that inhibits writing. They're afraid to write because they're afraid of writing badly, not understanding that even the greatest writers had to write many thousands of words of utter shit in order to develop their skill. (And not internalizing that even great writers revise, rewrite, and get the help of editors.) So they pursue methods of making their writing environment more optimal, buy various tools, or read endless books, magazines (back in the day), or blog posts on how to write—and when they try each new gimmick, they find they're still afraid. Obviously, then, they haven't tried enough and haven't optimized enough, so they go on to the next gimmick. It can be very hard to get over that fear. Writing can be a lot of effort. But getting there is much more satisfying than hanging back and trying to find the key to being a writer. The key is just writing. Published, unpublished, printed, made a cheap Amazon ebook, hosted on a free site, posted on a forum, emailed to a list, shown to a few friends, safely squirreled away on your hard drive for nobody else to ever see? Novels, short fiction, flash fiction, fan fiction, slash fiction? Blog posts, essays, books? Deathless prose or complete dreck? Doesn't matter: you wrote. You're a writer. (And yes, to be entirely fair, I don't actually think anyone has "nothing to say". But you have to actually say it, and these things can't squeeze that out of you.)
Jtsummers 8y ago
I want this loaded with a bunch of text adventure games.
vlunkr 8y ago
By far the more interesting part here is that they got a terminal to display on an e-ink screen. I've wanted to try that for a while now. If I could have my normal displays, plus and e-ink display as a terminal, that would really be sweet.
- nmstoker 8y ago
  Might be interested in this kind of approach: https://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/kindle-paperwhite-raspberry-pi-hack/ https://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/kindle-paperwhite-raspbe... It's still going to suffer with the e-ink refresh speed but depending on what you want to do in the terminal, you might be fine with it. Combined with a Pi Zero W (not available when the solution above was done in 2013) and the battery would probably last quite a while!
rtkwe 8y ago
That wrist position looks deeply un-ergonomic. Hate to think what it'll do long term writing like that.
codethief 8y ago
> Ben Kraznow found a way to implement a faster partial refresh which let you refresh the screen in about 0.3 seconds, which is more than enough for a text editing device. Meanwhile, on the r/thinkpad subreddit they're complaining about ~15ms delays on keyboards(×): https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/9j70v6/thinkpad_keyboard_firmware_worse_than_anyone/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/9j70v6/thinkpad_k... Granted, keyboard delay is to screen delay what an apple is to an orange but I still don't think I could live with a 0.3s screen delay while typing. ×) I know it's not exactly a delay but since typing any faster will cause typos I'd say, effectively it is.
clishem 8y ago
Or you can just pick up a second hand AlphaSmart Neo like I did. Weeks of battery life as well.
abdullahkhalids 8y ago
I am trying to build something similar. I have a raspberry pi zero W, a 7.5 inch e-ink screen and some power electronics from adafruit. Have to find a good keyboard and figure out how to build a case. I am looking to build something more portable and something with a cleaner design (no open wires/cables etc). An important design problem is how to match a 7.5 inch screen with a much larger keyboard. There is the design here, with a screen stuck in the middle of a large board - not very pretty looking. There is the https://getfreewrite.com/ https://getfreewrite.com/ way, which is aesthetically more elegant, but the angle and location of the screen seems worse from an ergonomic perspective. Does anybody have a better idea?
jacknews 8y ago
The alphasmart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart) is similar particularly the Dana which runs palmOS. I really like the 'banner' display format on those (it could be even wider, the full width of the keyboard). Using a standard format screen doesn't seem to offer much over a laptop with some kind of locked-down writing app. Does anyone sell that format lcd (or e-ink) display - ie about 10" x 1.5-2.0" (250x50mm). Could they be made to order, and how would you go about it (and what min. quantities to expect, etc)?
AstroAdam 8y ago
Freewrite creator here, nice project!

73 points by djsumdog 8y ago

A no-frills e-ink bash terminal machine would be a delight for working through a programming book in the park. If this were more portable and got longer battery life (24+ hours) I would pay a few hundred dollars for it.

mdonahoe 8y ago
yes please. I really want to use vim in the sun
CarVac 8y ago
I'd love to have one too.
GorgeRonde 8y ago
I own a Yotaphone 2 which is a a dual-screen android phone. The e-ink screen is able to display the whole OS and not just some widgets.

smacktoward 8y ago

I guess you know you're getting old when you start seeing people "invent" things that you saw people using every day when you were young. > I came to think, maybe we should create a digital typewriter giving us the best of the two worlds. What the author calls a "digital typewriter" is what originally used to be known as a "word processor" -- a standalone, dedicated digital device with a keyboard and a (typically small, typically monochrome) display, running built-in software for editing text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_(electronic_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_(electronic_dev... You would type on the keyboard and your words would appear on the display, where you could go back and edit typos and such if you needed to. The display usually only showed a few lines of text, but you could scroll up and down through the entire document using the screen as a buffer. Your work would be then persisted to some storage medium, often in later models a floppy disk. It wasn't WYSIWYG, but it was a vast advance over mechanical typewriters, for all the reasons the article mentions. These devices had their heyday from the '60s through the '80s. They were eventually rendered obsolete by the arrival of the inexpensive general-purpose personal computer. All the functions of the word processor could be provided on the PC via software, and the PC's bigger, more colorful display made it a better environment for doing those things anyway. The programs people used to do word processing on PCs came to be known as "word processors" themselves. Eventually the dedicated devices stopped being made, and I guess over time people just forgot that there was once a word processor that wasn't software. My mother was a writer, and I have many childhood memories of her sitting at her treasured Brother word processor. So perhaps I have more reason to remember the hardware word processor than most people do.

Semiapies 8y ago
And they keep reinventing it. I don't see a year going by without a Kickstarter or the like for one of these things. https://getfreewrite.com https://getfreewrite.com Further, we've had oodles of minimalist/cut down/focused/sensory deprivation gimmick word processors for the last twenty years, all essentially recreating the UI of every single DOS word processing program. And yet, whenever professional writers talk about what they write with, it's almost always MS Word or some crappy screenplay program. Not some minimalist program, not some special piece of hardware, just the standard tool available. (Occasionally, their preferred text editor if they're a geek - just another standard tool.) Decades and centuries ago, they used word processors or typewriters or pen and paper because those were the available, standard tools. Because a tool is just something to aid the act of writing, not a device for squeezing it out of you when you have nothing to say.
- ghaff 8y ago
  One of the issues is that, as soon as you get into any collaboration or editing, you have to move the document into some common format anyway. In which case, I usually find that I might as well have started there in the first place. I actually like Scrivener on the Mac for bigger projects. But given that, at some point, I'm going to have to switch to another tool, it's usually not worth using for the first draft.
  - Semiapies 8y ago
    You gotta do what works, yeah. Some people rig up stuff to make their tools work with others, others don't find that worth the effort; ultimately a personal call.
- dieterrams 8y ago
  You’re rather dismissive and uncharitable, aren’t you?
  - Semiapies 8y ago
    Dismissive, yes. Buying various tools for a craft does not make you a craftsman. You only become a writer by writing, not by buying silly hipster products "for writers". And there have always been such products aimed at people who don't actually write. Uncharitable, no. Some people want to "be a writer" for various reasons without actually wanting to write. It's anything from an imposed expectation (common in "creative" subcultures) to an affectation. If playing at being a writer makes them happy, that's harmless. There's no stolen valor in pretending to be a writer. But, some of the people buying these sorts of products could be writers. Very often, they buy these products out of fear, that being one of the major factors that inhibits writing. They're afraid to write because they're afraid of writing badly, not understanding that even the greatest writers had to write many thousands of words of utter shit in order to develop their skill. (And not internalizing that even great writers revise, rewrite, and get the help of editors.) So they pursue methods of making their writing environment more optimal, buy various tools, or read endless books, magazines (back in the day), or blog posts on how to write—and when they try each new gimmick, they find they're still afraid. Obviously, then, they haven't tried enough and haven't optimized enough, so they go on to the next gimmick. It can be very hard to get over that fear. Writing can be a lot of effort. But getting there is much more satisfying than hanging back and trying to find the key to being a writer. The key is just writing. Published, unpublished, printed, made a cheap Amazon ebook, hosted on a free site, posted on a forum, emailed to a list, shown to a few friends, safely squirreled away on your hard drive for nobody else to ever see? Novels, short fiction, flash fiction, fan fiction, slash fiction? Blog posts, essays, books? Deathless prose or complete dreck? Doesn't matter: you wrote. You're a writer. (And yes, to be entirely fair, I don't actually think anyone has "nothing to say". But you have to actually say it, and these things can't squeeze that out of you.)

Jtsummers 8y ago

I want this loaded with a bunch of text adventure games.

vlunkr 8y ago

By far the more interesting part here is that they got a terminal to display on an e-ink screen. I've wanted to try that for a while now. If I could have my normal displays, plus and e-ink display as a terminal, that would really be sweet.

nmstoker 8y ago
Might be interested in this kind of approach: https://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/kindle-paperwhite-raspberry-pi-hack/ https://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/kindle-paperwhite-raspbe... It's still going to suffer with the e-ink refresh speed but depending on what you want to do in the terminal, you might be fine with it. Combined with a Pi Zero W (not available when the solution above was done in 2013) and the battery would probably last quite a while!

rtkwe 8y ago

That wrist position looks deeply un-ergonomic. Hate to think what it'll do long term writing like that.

codethief 8y ago

> Ben Kraznow found a way to implement a faster partial refresh which let you refresh the screen in about 0.3 seconds, which is more than enough for a text editing device. Meanwhile, on the r/thinkpad subreddit they're complaining about ~15ms delays on keyboards(×): https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/9j70v6/thinkpad_keyboard_firmware_worse_than_anyone/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/9j70v6/thinkpad_k... Granted, keyboard delay is to screen delay what an apple is to an orange but I still don't think I could live with a 0.3s screen delay while typing. ×) I know it's not exactly a delay but since typing any faster will cause typos I'd say, effectively it is.

clishem 8y ago

Or you can just pick up a second hand AlphaSmart Neo like I did. Weeks of battery life as well.

abdullahkhalids 8y ago

I am trying to build something similar. I have a raspberry pi zero W, a 7.5 inch e-ink screen and some power electronics from adafruit. Have to find a good keyboard and figure out how to build a case. I am looking to build something more portable and something with a cleaner design (no open wires/cables etc). An important design problem is how to match a 7.5 inch screen with a much larger keyboard. There is the design here, with a screen stuck in the middle of a large board - not very pretty looking. There is the https://getfreewrite.com/ https://getfreewrite.com/ way, which is aesthetically more elegant, but the angle and location of the screen seems worse from an ergonomic perspective. Does anybody have a better idea?

jacknews 8y ago

The alphasmart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart) is similar particularly the Dana which runs palmOS. I really like the 'banner' display format on those (it could be even wider, the full width of the keyboard). Using a standard format screen doesn't seem to offer much over a laptop with some kind of locked-down writing app. Does anyone sell that format lcd (or e-ink) display - ie about 10" x 1.5-2.0" (250x50mm). Could they be made to order, and how would you go about it (and what min. quantities to expect, etc)?

AstroAdam 8y ago

Freewrite creator here, nice project!