13 ms·

Time to talk about my writerdeck

517 points by hggh 4mo ago

a1o 4mo ago
I would love a KingJim Pomera DM 250 but I can’t have it shipped easily and it is hard to find in a physical store.
FrankRay78 4mo ago
Anybody else wonder how the screenshots were taken?
- ZPrimed 4mo ago
  I think Veronica setup an identical demo copy in a VM and thus could easily screenshot the VM.
  - eichin 4mo ago
    In the associated video, she explains exactly that - a Debian Trixie VM specifically for screenshotting https://youtu.be/E7vFdy4BEAY?si=WVBxmCPLVEdRBbtU&t=114 https://youtu.be/E7vFdy4BEAY?si=WVBxmCPLVEdRBbtU&t=114
ltbarcly3 4mo ago
It looks like a chromebook running vim in a 50 point font. I can't wait to read 50 pages of how to do that!
jlundberg 4mo ago
The stress relief of a plain old Linux terminal should not be underestimated. Not only for writing, but for shell sessions too. I love my Raspberry Pi for that.
itrunsdoomguy 4mo ago
Awesome machine. Missing Doom though.
- Shellban 4mo ago
  https://github.com/wojciech-graj/doom-ascii https://github.com/wojciech-graj/doom-ascii
ramses0 4mo ago
Just zellij instead of tmux, it's so much better!
- allendoerfer 4mo ago
  How?
  - ramses0 4mo ago
    https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zellij https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zellij
    - archargelod 4mo ago
      That did not help. Seems like slightly different UI and written in Rust are two main "features" over tmux.
      - ramses0 4mo ago
        https://zellij.dev/tutorials/basic-functionality/ https://zellij.dev/tutorials/basic-functionality/ If you're already a tmux expert then zellij is probably no big deal, and the "written in rust" part is more of a red-herring than the headline. Firstly, it doesn't conflict with Ctrl-A by default (but I think that's actually `screen`), second it has mouse support, floating window, saved layouts, stacked tabs, session picker/manager, and take a look at the configuration mechanism: https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/blob/main/zellij-utils/assets/config/default.kdl https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/blob/main/zellij-utils/... ...for some reason it's just feels "super-sensible", comfortable, and allows a lot of flexibility. The concept of "booting layouts" (a very poor-man's `docker compose` ;-) is really interesting and powerful: https://zellij.dev/documentation/layouts.html https://zellij.dev/documentation/layouts.html https://zellij.dev/documentation/creating-a-layout.html https://zellij.dev/documentation/creating-a-layout.html ...and I've got like a total of like 1.5hrs of zellij usage under my belt. I've never been one to be super attached to screen/tmux, tried out byobu... none of them clicked in the same way with power, ease, and flexibility that zellij felt like it provided right away. Again: this may be telling a vim user about the power of emacs, in which case just nod and smile and go about your day, but since these terminal multiplexers are effectively "just UX", then a "slightly different UX" may end up being in actuality the whole compelling product!
dragonfax 4mo ago
Reminds me of word processing on DOS back in the 80s and early 90s. Pre-WYSIWYG.
- vidarh 4mo ago
  Especially with that colour palette it very much gives Word Perfect 5.1 vibes[1], which I suspect is either directly intentional, or indirectly so (inspiration from something inspired by WP) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#/media/File:Wordperfect-5.1-dos.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#/media/File:Wordpe...
daoboy 4mo ago
I'm desperately awaiting the perfect eink device for this. I've got a great writing setup on Obsidian that really works for me, a royal kludge mechanical keyboard...just waiting on the next gen of eink The Boox One Note Max was sooo close, but they almost immediately discontinued the product and probably won't be supporting it long. Suggestions are welcome
- drakonka 4mo ago
  I use the Onyx Boox Palma for a portable eink drafting setup. It's worked pretty well. I wrote about it here: https://liza.io/portable-writing-setup-with-onyx-boox-palma/ https://liza.io/portable-writing-setup-with-onyx-boox-palma/
  - daoboy 4mo ago
    That's very similar to the setup I'm working on, including the stand. Thanks for sharing! One of the appealing features on the Note Max was the screen size (13.3"). How do you find working on such a small screen?
    - drakonka 4mo ago
      For me the small screen is fine as long as I can maintain the mindset of this being a _drafting_ tool, not an editing or structuring tool. I generally don't need to see more than a couple of sentences at a time, and my drafting process is almost stream-of-consciousness as I just focus on getting the words out. If I needed to navigate more to edit or regularly reference prior sections, the small screen would be a hindrance.
  - stavros 4mo ago
    > The keyboad Perhaps you should have chosen a better one?!
    - drakonka 4mo ago
      I chose the keyboard I wanted :)
normie3000 4mo ago
> I'm trying to be more intentional with my tech choices. I want devices that do one thing really well, and that when I'm done with that one thing, I can put them away, and do something else. I don't want everything to follow me around everywhere. Sign me up. I would like an audio device which can play mp3, podcasts, internet radio. Bonus points if it supports some kind of cartridge system, size between credit card and audio cassette. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
- CharlesW 4mo ago
  You have hundreds of options for devices like this. Amazon alone shows 200, or well over 300 if you don't need live internet audio streams. You're about to respond: "But many of these use Android, and general purpose computers are too distracting for me." In that case, you'll need to forego live internet audio streams and buy a closed option with a radio receiver.
- skydhash 4mo ago
  > I would like an audio device which can play mp3, podcasts, internet radio. That internet radio is a whole magnitude of complexity, especially with the need for wifi (cellular?) if it needs to be portable. But there are options like specially modified android devices. I have the Shangling M0 with a 512GB card. I don’t even bother with converting my flac files. A nice other device is my kobo. It holds my entire fiction library with space to spare.
- Rotundo 4mo ago
  > I would like an audio device which can play mp3, podcasts, internet radio. Get a second-hand Apple iPod Touch, remove all apps you don't need. For just mp3 and podcasts: get an iPod Classic (or Video) and install Rockbox. Rockbox is amazing.
manaskarekar 4mo ago
Doogie Howser M.D. vibes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX0_Tuzr4wE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX0_Tuzr4wE
LeoPanthera 4mo ago
Consider wordgrinder, a console word processor, as distinct from a text editor. https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder
vidarh 4mo ago
I don't think I could go this far, because I'd have too many devices to switch between. But I like the overall idea. It also fits in well with something I used to think about a lot: Computers and the internet have caused a major shift toward hiding a lot of things that used to be much more apparent. E.g. your important papers would be in a physical file. Your books would be on the shelves. Your art on the walls. Visitors and family members could see them. Quite a few things I have in common with my late dad were a result of finding his books on the shelves as physical objects. Now most of the books I've bought (and a couple I've written) over the last couple of decades are on my phone or my computer, and not visible to anyone who doesn't know where to look. I've tried to be deliberate about showing my son the books I think he'll like, but those of my dads books, and manuscripts he wrote, that I ended up picking up and reading were only partially those he showed me - many more were books he had no inkling I'd like, or didn't think were age appropriate, that I stumbled on over the years. Moving all of those things into files on general purpose devices, away from physical objects, feels like it is unmooring us from parts of our immediate surroundings.
- coffeefirst 4mo ago
  I’ve started to undo it. Not everything, but I went back and bought used copies of every ebook that I wanted to keep forever. It was pretty cheap (many used books are $1) and feels good to have my full library browsable and free from any platform or company.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  There’s also a distinct joy of wondering through a library looking at the spines of books on the shelves, occasionally pulling one down to scan the table of contents, and taking one or a few of those to a table to read a couple pages…
dangus 4mo ago
I like the idea of the setup and the philosophy behind it but I don’t like the implementation as much. If I’m spending a lot of time with text I’d really like the text and editor to have a much better aesthetic appearance than what I’m seeing here. I also think having something with graphical capability is nice to have but I know that’s a preference thing. For me, a mouse is a valuable tool in a text editor even if that usage is occasional. I also think there is a lot of manual setup of things like keyboard brightness controls and battery status that are already built in to every mainstream Linux distro imaginable. I would have gone about it in some other way like: 1. Install Fedora/Linux Mint/whatever 2. Make a login script that opens Obsidian or an editor of choice upon login and puts it in full screen mode. 3. Hide the KDE taskbar and/or just choose a highly minimal window manager. 4. Done.
fsckboy 4mo ago
HN deletes certain words at the beginnings of submitted titles: could we add "It's time to talk about" and potentially also "my"?
- kwertyoowiyop 4mo ago
  What we talk about when we talk about… The unreasonable effectiveness of… All you need is…
- ramon156 4mo ago
  I kinda like it. I'd even do something like "its time everyone talks about ..." As long as you don't take yourself too serious, people won't either
chungusamongus 4mo ago
The way people are coping with the current hellscape that is 2026 is interesting to me. Somehow, it always seems to be internalization. Like, if only I can lock in using this distraction free method, if only I start buying more physical media, if only I use a dumb phone and an mp3 player for my music, etc. etc., somehow that will resolve the intractable shitstorm happening right now. And none of that is even going to be a drop in the ocean in terms of making your life better. Only collective action has the potential to do that at this stage.
- bigyabai 4mo ago
  > And none of that is even going to be a drop in the ocean in terms of making your life better. I disagree 100%. Collective action isn't ever going to persuade Apple or Google to correct course. Collective action has already failed to compel Microsoft for 30+ years. These companies picked their side and your bargaining has zero leverage if you continue to purchase their products and suffer their indignation. You can only improve your life by getting rid of disrespectful advertising and low-quality slopware. The victim mindset is a lazy lie, one that you tell yourself to justify a net negative lifestyle.
  - chungusamongus 4mo ago
    The victim mindset? What about my initial statement implies that I perceive myself or others as victims? Sounds like projection.
    - infinitezest 4mo ago
      "You sound defensive"
    - bigyabai 4mo ago
      > What about my initial statement implies that I perceive myself or others as victims? >> The way people are coping >> the intractable shitstorm happening right now. >> a drop in the ocean in terms of making your life better.
- 4mo ago
em-bee 4mo ago
the key goal here seems to be to remove temptation. for me just switching to a virtual console and firing up vim there would be enough because switching back to the gui would involve typing a long password which i believe for me would be deterrent enough to not keep switching on a whim. if you are not as easily tempted then running a terminal in fullscreen might just be enough.
stavros 4mo ago
Jesus christ I cannot believe it took this article for me to realize after so many years that leaving the root password empty would set my user up for sudo. Every single installation, the first thing I'd do is log in and lock root and give my user sudo! No more of that! Thanks, this article!
homeonthemtn 4mo ago
This is what Lao Tzu writer studio will be once the hardware version drops. A specialized writing deck akin to a modern type writer but feature rich and sleeeeeek
salamander014 4mo ago
I've wanted to do this for a while. Thanks for detailing your setup! I hope one day I find the time to try it. I've also always yearned for more usability from just the command line. There's no tui spotify client, is there? Maybe I should break out my mp3 collection again... I'm trying to think of what else I'd really need to not need a GUI machine for my day to day. Maybe email? Lynx and other tui browsers are not usable on today's web. Maybe there's a subculture to find somewhere that also appreciates reader-mode / lack of javascript? If so anyone please lead me to the promise land!
- qsort 4mo ago
  It's hard to find the kind of person who likes both, but the ultimate CLI enabler is AI. Ironically, since the rise of actually useful agents I've been using less web and GUI stuff and more CLI. git, ssh, vim, tmux, psql, sqlite3, codex, claude. What more can I ask for? The "there's a unix pipeline for that" mentality that was technically true but ultimately impractical 5 years ago now works phenomenally well. I wouldn't go as far as removing the gui entirely from my machine, but I'm literally down to the modern web browser as the final holdout.
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    I agree that UX in the LLM age has been woefully under explored. I feel like whole new paradigms are waiting to be explored, but right now everyone is just trying to shoehorn AI into a corner of existing UIs.
    - qsort 4mo ago
      100%. I use AI more than most and always with frontier models from OpenAI/Anthropic, but most of the AI features I see around are complete slop. Like why would I ever want to interact with slow, unresponsive JS popups and the cheapest tokens you could find when I'm already paying for actually good models? At the same time the chat paradigm is very undercooked for any use case that isn't Google-like.
- mamcx 4mo ago
tedd4u 4mo ago
1) Cool! Only think I can recommend is using use a taller 4:3-ish screen (like a Framework) for this. You could maybe have two columns of text available. 2) More broadly, one tip I've found to reduce phone engagement is to set the phone to black & white only. It's significantly less interesting and prone to sucking you in. (You can do this on iOS & Android.)
hank808 4mo ago
"Writerdeck' or simple word processor? They were first sold in the 1960s or 70s. Why? Buy, not build I'm thinking.
- kibwen 4mo ago
  The author already had the hardware, better to not buy than to buy.
  - hank808 4mo ago
    You're not gettin' the point. There's nothing here if you think about it for 10 seconds. Any ancient anything, could run vi, or vim, or Emacs, or friggin' wordstar, natively or via emulation or WHATEVER. There's nothing here.
    - McGlockenshire 4mo ago
      You seem to be missing the entire point of the exercise and perhaps you should go back and read the article again to understand what you're missing.
      - hank808 4mo ago
        Nopes. I'm strongly suggesting that we already had a frigging word for these things, that's also still valid AF today, and it's "word processor." Not f'n writerdeck or whatever. Dumb.
        retired_account 4mo ago
        > valid AF Nope. We already had a frigging phrase for that, and it’s “completely valid”, not “valid AF” or “cromulent” or whatever. Dumb.
cl3misch 4mo ago
> I had to set my syncthing web GUI to be listening on all addresses instead of just 127.0.0.1. I don't love this approach, but again, this thing has nothing private on it. OP mentions SOCKS proxy but you can also just port-forward the one web ui port instead: ssh -nNT writerdeck -L 8484:localhost:8384 and visit http://localhost:8484 on your normal machine.
ChuckMcM 4mo ago
This is a really interesting system. I find that I end up using an iPad with all my PDFs as reference materials when I'm writing, it would be nice to attach an external monitor in 'portrait' mode which exclusively hosted a single application that could let me select PDFs from my collection and display them on the screen. Then with one unit I'd have what I needed in one place.
owenversteeg 4mo ago
I've accidentally made one of these; I broke X on an old thinkpad with Arch and never bothered to fix it. The problem for me is getting myself to actually use it. Most of the time, it sits there gathering dust. If anyone has tips for this I'd love to hear them.
cyberpunk 4mo ago
If anyone is considering using a computer like this, I'd recommend OpenBSD for it which genuinely has one of the prettiest console fonts. It just ... Looks nicer.. Yes, I'm sure you can configure the others to look nice too but shrug OOTB is pretty nice.
- em-bee 4mo ago
  what are the names of the fonts are they using? i found something here, but i am not sure if these are the right ones: https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/share/misc/pcvtfonts?sort=File https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/share/misc/pcvtfonts?sort=Fil...
  - skydhash 4mo ago
    Those are fonts you can load with the vga driver. Anything recent will load with the drm driver (intel, amd) or framebuffer. This emulates a text mode (rasops) on a graphical surfaces (vga has dedicated text mode), and for that they use spleen. https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/wsfont?sort=File https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/wsfont?sort=File https://github.com/fcambus/spleen https://github.com/fcambus/spleen And yes, it’s quite nice.
    - em-bee 4mo ago
      awesome, thank you. i remember vga vs framebuffer, and the time when linux made the switch. i was there, many thousand days ago. i might even have recognized that had those files mentioned vga somewhere in the path or contents. spleen looks good. i am using gallant right now which is based on the old sparcstation console font: https://github.com/NanoBillion/gallant https://github.com/NanoBillion/gallant
- treve 4mo ago
  I've been wondering if I can somehow get the Toshiba Satellite VGA font back to today.
CobrastanJorji 4mo ago
This is an awesome setup. I like it, good job. That said, I do think there's a bit of irony to solving your "paying attention to writing" problem by setting up your OS from scratch, choosing to swap out the default networking stack, installing a novel flavor of your preferred text editor because you're "trying to get to know it a bit more," customizing your battery readouts, tweaking the login sequence, and then, after all that effort to make sure you'd have the perfect environment for uninterrupted writing sessions, installing tmux so that you'll be able to do multiple things at a time.
- cgriswald 4mo ago
  I went with paper and pen precisely because there was always more I wanted to do with my computer work flow.
  - obsidianbases1 4mo ago
    Pen and paper for writing. Computer for editing.
    - sixtyj 4mo ago
      Paper notebook. I wouldn’t recommend loose sheets of paper. :) After 15 years of writing notes on loose sheets I would start differently :) Go Tim Ferris way - notebook where the first page is left for the table of contents, and number all even-numbered pages as first step.
      - obsidianbases1 4mo ago
        My thoughts are so all over the place that I've settled on 3x5 note cards. It also makes the transition to the computer much easier, because I can re-arrange them in a way that is somewhat organized before taking a picture that gets transcribed
        SanjayMehta 4mo ago
qsort 4mo ago
Great to see Veronica at the top of HN. She's a great creator, highly recommend her content.
- JKCalhoun 4mo ago
  (Music creator too, ha ha.)
iib 4mo ago
If anyone wants to try this without the intricate setup, if you have a linux system, you most probably can just press Ctrl+Alt+F3 and drop into a tty console directly. To return, you have to press Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+F2. You also have multiple consoles, up until F12 probably. I used to use this a lot when trying for a less distracting desktop, just like in the original post.
- SubiculumCode 4mo ago
  Yes, and if you want it to boot directly into a tty mode run: sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target As an aside: on some of my computers it is Ctrl+Alt+F2 but on others it is Ctrl+Alt+F7 to return to graphical mode.
  - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
    Maybe this have changed over the years, and I rarely if ever used these combinations to switch to TTY except for emergency (OOM, or window manager breakage), but on every Linux system I ever used, graphical mode was on (Ctrl+Alt+)F7.
    - embedding-shape 4mo ago
      Using CachyOS right now, gdm/mutter/gnome ended up on Ctrl+Alt+F1, I can't remember if it was crunchbang or some other older distribution, but been others too using various numbers. I agree F7 is most common though.
  - spl757 4mo ago
    I'm a proverbial greybeard and Ctrl+Alt+F7 used to just be what you did to get back to your desktop GUI. FWIW, right now I'm typing this from Ubuntu Studio 24.04 and it's Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get back to the GUI. Ctrl+Alt+F1 shows you the bootup output scroll, +F3 to +F6 will give you a login prompt to drop into a shell. +F7 to +F12 just give me a blinking cursor un the upper right corner of the display. I'm kinda surprised only +F3 to +F6 give me a shell login. Three isn't that many.
tyleo 4mo ago
I use the same Mac to write that I use for everything else. But I find it’s more useful to disconnect from multiple screens and just use the laptop on my desk if I need to focus. Those idle screens taunt me with a desire to use them for Slack or Hacker News when I’m trying to work.
mateioo7 4mo ago
This article reminded me of something I've been thinking a lot these past few months, that is having my computer split in 2 modes: 1. work, having everything available in a desktop OS 2. personal, a console-only mode with a few basic functionalities I consider not time wasting: ebook reader, weather forecast, next sport events, 1 TV show episode per day, calculator, calendar, timer, etc Since I use the extremely configurable awesomewm window manager, this switch would not be hard to implement and have me locked (somehow) based on day of the week or time on work days. LE: actually, the console-only mode would be more of a menu-only one with something like rofi desktop [1]. Something very minimal and easy to use. [1] https://github.com/giomatfois62/rofi-desktop https://github.com/giomatfois62/rofi-desktop
- sixtyj 4mo ago
  I haven’t known awesomewm. Thumb up. As I switch between Win and Linux, I have found FancyWM for win10/11 that should do the similar. (Ofc you’ve to use mouse in Windows.)
btrettel 4mo ago
I had a similar setup in 2023, but the computer was reformatted after I moved. I wrote a HN comment about the setup before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792204 I liked it and intend to use a similar setup in the future. There were quite a few "rough edges", unfortunately. In retrospect, a tiling window manager would have been a better choice. I found Midnight Command to be great for this, with its integrated file manager, file viewer (mcview), editor (mcedit), and diff (mcdiff). I didn't realize how much I relied on a unified clipboard until I didn't have one any longer. mcedit's clipboard was a file (or one of them was?), so I had to adjust some workflows. The biggest problem came from my need to view a lot of PDF files. I had a framebuffer PDF viewer that was pretty clunky. It did not work with tmux and PDF files could not be opened directly from Midnight Commander as I recall. This specifically is why I'm thinking about a tiling window manager as I won't have to pick a clunky PDF viewer and the remainder will just work.
kaashif 4mo ago
This reads like someone with ADHD took Adderall and accidentally focused hard for a day on the wrong thing. It has happened to me. I guess if this writerdeck works persistently for many projects then fine. But if every 2 projects the writerdeck gets revamped then it seems like a way to get a dopamine hit or distract ones self. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't seem like it's a net benefit in terms of focus.
- nicbou 4mo ago
  Same. However, for a while, I did not need to work much, and indulging in such things was an absolute delight. It was entertainment, but it also benefited me when I actually worked.
- cortesoft 4mo ago
  > focused hard for a day on the wrong thing Entirely depends on what the author wanted to focus on. Who are we to say what is the right or wrong thing to focus on?
  - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
    I built my whole career on focusing on the wrong thing. In fact, focusing on the right thing makes me slow down, struggle, and get bogged down with frustration. I still learn 10+x faster when focusing on the wrong thing, and after two decades of this, I now know I have to regularly focus on the wrong thing with passion - those are the moments I pick up knowledge and experience that, few months to years later, people pay me to apply to their problems.
    - napkin 4mo ago
      This is me. I’ve gamified it to the extent that, to control my passion, I play tricks to ensure that the right thing becomes the wrong thing. My brain must believe it is procrastinating. For example, I often don’t pay my bills (the money isn’t the issue). I have to have sufficient debts that they become convincing boogeymen. Work can’t feel like escape if there’s nothing to escape from.
    - 4mo ago
worik 4mo ago
Good idea X-Windows and it's ilk are awesome software. For a single purpose machine it is unnecessary I've been doing the same thing in different domains
rpastuszak 4mo ago
I’m working on one! It’s early stage, but it’s relatively low latency e paper writing tool with my writing tool Ensō. I’m calling it Writer’s Block. (I love carpentry and want it to look a bit like a wooden pencil case.) the prototype will be a literal log of wood (guess the name). It makes sense because the larger form factor allows for faster prototyping!
elias1233 4mo ago
Very interesting! But how do you display images?
- em-bee 4mo ago
  fbi - the framebuffer image viewer. various versions exist. there is also a webbrowser and a pdf viewer among other things. i figure the pdf viewer is especially handy for someone focused on writing. and the browser may be good enough to handle a blog...
UncleSlacky 4mo ago
Why not just use DOS? e.g.: https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos At least the laptops that can still run DOS natively tend to have fairly good keyboards...
- dredmorbius 4mo ago
  You'd have to find a suitable editor. For a long time I had a copy of Wordperfect 4.x which I'd fire up occasionally under either DOSEmu or FreeDOS. Among other disappointments: - I've forgotten virtually all my WP muscle-memory. Vim is where it's at. (I was once quite proficient at WP, but the last time I used it significantly was well over 30 years ago.) - I find DOS apps tend to play poorly with any screen resolution other than 80x24 or so. I prefer more information density, but even running a console (rather than a terminal app) the experience tends to be subpar. That said, for someone with familiarity with the apps and not too picky about resolution, that's an option.
  - alexhans 4mo ago
    When I saw this post I immediately thought of WordPerfect. It had such a pleasant interface for that time. But yeah, one of the things made me go for vim over Emacs a long time ago was its relationship with touch typing and not leaving the home row with the vim modes. Learn Vim script the hard way [1], even if you didn't end up writing any actual vim script, was a game changer in terms of understanding the semantics. [1] - https://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/ https://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/ was
    - lproven 4mo ago
      > When I saw this post I immediately thought of WordPerfect. The final DOS WordPerfect works wonderfully on even early 21st century kit. But it's not free. WordPerfect still exists and it's on sale. So, in USB-DOS, I included WPEDIT, the WordPerfect plain text editor, which has the same UI but no formatting.
  - lproven 4mo ago
risingsubmarine 4mo ago
Has me thinking about laser-focused task alternatives. WorldDeck : 3D art / game development GengoDeck : Japanese Immersion / Studying TuneDeck : Making music. SteamDeck : A deck for... oh I think this idea is taken. Hmm. No i think I'll get back to working... for now.
gib444 4mo ago
Can I tangent to some love for the Debian TUI installer? Just seeing it evokes such pleasing thoughts. I don't think it's changed a whole lot in at least 10 years, maybe more. I think it's pretty well designed in terms of UX. I have never seen it crash or bug out. Even the graphical version is excellent. They've resisted using a web view, thank god (giving you the side eye, Fedora) A lot of respect and love for Debian!
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
ungreased0675 4mo ago
I recently installed Alpine Linux as part of a side quest and was blown away by just how fast it was without running a GUI or loading up a bunch of background programs. It was so fast a little voice has been telling me my daily driver laptop should run a minimal Linux distribution like Alpine.
- lproven 4mo ago
  It's quite remarkable, isn't it? It is how Linux used to be in the 1990s: tiny, simple, blindingly fast compared to the big lumbering commercial OSes... ... Which now are also Linux. Which is terribly terribly sad.
  - OriginalPenguin 4mo ago
    They weren’t blindingly fast then. The hardware was so much slower in the 90s. It’s difficult to remember just how slow a 5400rpm hard drive was.
    - lproven 4mo ago
      Oh no it isn't. I started before floppy disks were widespread. Floppies were sooooooo good after tape cassettes. :-)
richardlblair 4mo ago
I find fhe discourse here hilarious. Haven't most of us built our skillsets and careers out of side quests? There is so much I wouldn't know or understand if I didn't go down the odd rabit hole.
- kaashif 4mo ago
  I think going down side quests is good, that's how I learnt lots of what I know. But if my goal was to run daily and my first step was to make an open source step tracker with a raspberry pi dock...
- meribold 4mo ago
  Lots of comments are also massively overestimating the amount of time/effort that creating this setup required.
choilive 4mo ago
Soooo.. not to sound like a luddite but to me the best dedicated writing device for me has been just pen and a notebook or a typewriter. There are surprisingly many "portable" typewriter options out there (including electronic ones).
- teruakohatu 4mo ago
  > There are surprisingly many "portable" typewriter options out there (including electronic ones). An odd laptop ($0) with free software ($0) makes more sense than buying another electronic device.
  - choilive 4mo ago
    If you don't value your time sure. Pen and paper is also basically free and even simpler with no setup time..
    - archargelod 4mo ago
      Handwriting or using a typewriter is great if you're writing something solely for enjoyment of the process. But if you want to store, organize and use any of your writing in the future - you have to go digital.
caioricciuti 4mo ago
I keep gravitating toward similar setups. Once you remove the option to fiddle with fonts and layouts, you're left with just the writing. Console-only Debian on an old laptop is about as distraction-free as it gets without going full typewriter.
- rrvsh 4mo ago
  The only thing holding me back from tty as desktop environment is terminal alt modes - i find it annoying when nvim leaves behind a ghost of itself
  - skydhash 4mo ago
    Doesn’t tmux support alternate screen. You could run everything in a tmux session and get alternate screen that way.
    - rrvsh 4mo ago
      ah, great idea. I stopped using a multiplexer when i switched to using a terminal with tabs - thank you for the tip
altairprime 4mo ago
Gosh, this is everything I miss about my FreeBSD Vaio back in the day. Huh. Well. Thanks for the memories and heartily endorsing this based on past experience (before having a writing focus need, and so I’d never connected the dots)!
andai 4mo ago
A couple years ago I was having difficulty working (couldn't get ADHD meds due to unspecified global calamity). I decided that unproductivity was unacceptable and so I simply engineered out the failure modes. 1. If I skipped a day on my project, the chance of catastrophic derailment increased exponentially. So I decided I had to work on it every day. (But only for an hour, to make it easy.) 2. If I waited until later in the day to begin working, the chance that I would miss a day increased exponentially. So I decided I had to work as soon as I woke up. 3. If I connected to the internet while working, the chance that I got derailed increased exponentially. So I just turned off my router and phone the night before. (Good for sleep hygiene, I did it an hour before bed and found that I could actually concentrate on paper books again, with the infinite Satans removed from my life. What a concept.) Obviously unplugging your router is going to piss off your housemates, so a good alternative is buying a Wifi repeater for $10 and putting your devices on that. (You can just put them in airplane mode, of course -- but I find the physical ritual of yanking the damn thing out of the wall has something special to it.)
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
pickleballcourt 4mo ago
Is this supposed to replicate the typewriter experience?
Eighth 4mo ago
There's a lot of 'But what about' in the comments. I think it's a delightful setup. I love simplicity and tools that do one thing well.
deadbabe 4mo ago
I think what would really make a nice writerdeck is an E-ink screen. Would be perfect for purely text based interface.
- wolvoleo 4mo ago
  Yes and you could sit outside in nature
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
desireco42 4mo ago
Look, it does look like overkill but I totally understand you and where you are coming from... I managed to publish my first book, second getting final review and third one is in editing... fully connected. AI came up with all the names for the characters, did a research on places and such. Huge help. I did check it all. For example a name AI claimed was French, totally was German and had to be replaced, but otherwise it is of huge help in writing if used correctly. But here is a thing that made the most difference. Dictation. And not into dumb mac or phone transcriber. I use Typeless and used Superwhispt before, Typeless has amazing keyboard replacement and understand Serbian and transcribe it to English with minimal issues. I dictate in my own Obsidian vault, to Inbox, which is then processed and sorted out by SidianSidekicks service (I am the founder). I look weird because I am talking to myself everywhere I go, but it is amazingly productive.
tekawade 4mo ago
This is awesome and inspiring. I am almost always setup Linux as a server (command line only). Unless until I have need to have native gui. If needed ‘sshd’ to use from other machines. Here are some more recommendations (not my repos): 1. helix-editor (rust based lightweight and fast) 2. Starship.sh (command line) 3. Nerd fonts (not sure how It will work only used with remote systems) 4. Zellij (cause it’s rust based not strong argument here) 5. Biased for ‘zsh’ too
bitmasher9 4mo ago
I was really hoping to learn more about the actual writing process than someone’s Linux setup. It’s a bit too complicated for my taste, I can bang out about a thousand words an hour in a chrome tab, given a sufficient source of coffee and the opportunity to silence non-urgent notifications. I’m specifically struggling with large project editing. I have multiple projects that are hundreds of pages long, but need much more editorial efforts before they see the light of day. Editing anything longer than 10 pages feels like pulling teeth, so I end up underpublished.
throw10920 4mo ago
There's a pattern that I notice a lot on HN. "To solve this problem, I engineered an entire system from scratch." Response: "That's a cool solution. But, isn't it a lot more work than this straightforward solution?" (the user is right - the complicated solution is massively more work than the straightforward one) Response: "Yes, but it's a cool project - it's OK to not be the most efficient all the time." (also right - there's nothing wrong with doing projects with zero utility just for the fun of it, and this one actually does have some use) It seems like there's a bifurcation of expectations. Some people want to do a project, and they take a thin justification as an excuse to do so. Other people really do want to solve a problem, but they get mired in perfectionism and overengineering, or aren't even aware of the simpler solution. Conflation between these two categories keeps many HN threads gainfully employed. (worth noting that for people in the latter category, pointing out "there's this simpler solution" can be incredibly helpful, because they simply might not know that it exists, or maybe they need a little bit of pushing to realize that they're overengineering things and that they got stuck in a place that they don't actually want to be in. this has been me, many many times)
- fcarraldo 4mo ago
  Forums are made up of many individual people who all have their own perspectives. It is not all black and white, zero sum, good or bad.
  - throw10920 4mo ago
    Right, I'm not saying any of those latter things. It's just interesting to note patterns, and sometimes people are actually in a local minimum that they appreciate being pushed out of.
- simpaticoder 4mo ago
  You didn't describe, but rather demonstrated, another aspect of the pattern which is that someone inevitably "goes meta" and remarks on the pattern - and usually someone points out that it's "not black and white" and the sub-thread decays into muttering obscurity with no real conclusion or insight. Personally I've come to see this as a niche form of "exuberance of the young" which is itself wasteful in the strictest sense, but is more generously characterized as a side-effect of other, hopefully more important personal maturation effects.
troad 4mo ago
It's interesting to me how few people seem willing to just turn off notifications. I'm all on board with setting up a retro machine for fun, but if one wants to focus on writing, there are ways to achieve this that don't require the sacrifice of good font rendering, comfortable colours, etc. The fact that the Music app notifies you of the new song is not some immovable law of nature...
- tonyedgecombe 4mo ago
  That still leaves the browser a couple of keypresses away which is too close for many.
bitwize 4mo ago
Before dunking on this lady for rolling her own writerdeck Linux distro, consider that I see advertisements for rather weaksauce devices, often with tiny LCD or, if they're posh, e-paper screens and very limited functionality compared to something like vim, for between $500 and $1200 USD. For an electric typewriter whose entire value proposition could have been achieved with a DOS PC. Veronica put a used laptop to work achieving much the same thing for next to nothing, except her time of course. It's not reverse-engineering an obscure Space Shuttle computer, but it's the kind of effort I think we want to reward on a site called Hacker News.
crionuke 4mo ago
I have thought I need similar setup but for mobile to work on text notes, legacy iphone or something would be nice
LAC-Tech 4mo ago
I've wanted to do this for general productivty; if I could find a good LLM to give me links I could forgo even a TUI web browser. perfect dev machine. The default linux TTY is pretty barebones though. No unicode, and lots of TUI apps expect 256 colours. KMSCON looks like an interesting solution.
MomsAVoxell 4mo ago
I have been writing for some time now, on a very large variety of devices, and my current go-to is an iPad and keyboard .. at various times the smart thingy (from Apple) .. but also often now lately with a Bluetooth logi .. just to give the joints a bit of variety as they get older and crankier .. I do miss the old typewriter. Not so much the selectric era, but more the well-balanced instrumentation of a manual. Still, there is a lot to be said for the amber glow of full-screened vim session on such a portable device. The one thing I truly wish for, is a solar-powered writerdeck, i.e. 100% off grid, forever. Just like the good ol’ typewriter ..
rldjbpin 4mo ago
interesting choice to use syncthing instead of rsync, given the OP is already comfortable with it. equally curious to see why it was not even mentioned nor discussed for regular readers/viewers. my main concern with the setup was with the additional config required to make sure sleep states and other hw annoyances are in check. but it does help to have a well-supported linux machine as a base!
- kowbell 4mo ago
  I install syncthing on ~all my devices and haven't yet touched rsync. Some reasons I prefer it: 1. It's automatic (sure, scripting regular rsync syncs probably isn't hard, but...) 2. It's p2p across all my devices (which from what I understand is not how rsync operates) So as long as my laptop and my desktop are both turned on I can trust they're always fully up-to-sync with each other, and in my experience they always are.
  - rldjbpin 4mo ago
    as a personal syncthing user, i get it. although its clients in non-linux os can be better, especially on ios. on the other hand, the accompanying video did mention rsync and a future video on syncthing, which might shed some more light on this decision.
hambes 4mo ago
I've always wanted to do this, but can't get over the linux tty only supporting 256 colors. If I could get that higher and maybe add unicode support, I'd love to go tty only.
SeattleAntifa 4mo ago
No.
nottorp 4mo ago
All it's missing is WordPerfect 5.1 in DosBox!
rav3ndust 4mo ago
i saw this video the other day on youtube (veronica's yt channel is great if you haven't watched!), and cool to see other people doing it as well. it reminded me of a similar setup i have, dubbed 'protocol7', which is a tty-only setup tailored for this kind of thing and for use on servers/headless pi setups. i use it for writing, intentional reading/browsing via lynx, managing gemini capsules (and reading gemini capsules - thank you amfora!), and just all-round "cozy computing". tmux-heavy, and (to me) very comfortable to use. my current 'protocol7' machine is my trusty old thinkpad x200. :)
jeffrallen 4mo ago
Wonder if Lynx can connect to ChatGPT. <evil wink>
ewrgrghyeuhy 4mo ago
fuzix (or serenityOS/Haiku)+mechanical or magnetic keyboard 60-80% but with home, arrow, ins, pgup-down del. And a week of working time on one charge
ksd482 4mo ago
Nowhere it mentioned anything about saving the progress. Can someone comment on if there's a way to autosave the files on every keystroke?
- linux2647 4mo ago
  Vim swap files (.swp) are periodically saved out to disk. In the event of a crash, reopening a file will present you with a screen asking if you want to recover the file. I doubt it’s character by character, but I’m sure vim has a setting to speed it up
SanjayMehta 4mo ago
TLDR: "I installed a text only Linux on a laptop"
cassidoo 4mo ago
I also made a writerdeck! They are the best: https://cassidoo.co/post/micro-journal/ https://cassidoo.co/post/micro-journal/
thewisenerd 4mo ago
on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7vFdy4BEAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7vFdy4BEAY not sure if i saw the link in the blog; but the youtube video attaches TFA as the companion blog post.
realaaa 4mo ago
wow all that is music to my ears ! and yes, attention problem is too real these days, for most of us - thanks for sharing this !

517 points by hggh 4mo ago

a1o 4mo ago

I would love a KingJim Pomera DM 250 but I can’t have it shipped easily and it is hard to find in a physical store.

FrankRay78 4mo ago

Anybody else wonder how the screenshots were taken?

ZPrimed 4mo ago
I think Veronica setup an identical demo copy in a VM and thus could easily screenshot the VM.
- eichin 4mo ago
  In the associated video, she explains exactly that - a Debian Trixie VM specifically for screenshotting https://youtu.be/E7vFdy4BEAY?si=WVBxmCPLVEdRBbtU&t=114 https://youtu.be/E7vFdy4BEAY?si=WVBxmCPLVEdRBbtU&t=114

ltbarcly3 4mo ago

It looks like a chromebook running vim in a 50 point font. I can't wait to read 50 pages of how to do that!

jlundberg 4mo ago

The stress relief of a plain old Linux terminal should not be underestimated. Not only for writing, but for shell sessions too. I love my Raspberry Pi for that.

itrunsdoomguy 4mo ago

Awesome machine. Missing Doom though.

Shellban 4mo ago
https://github.com/wojciech-graj/doom-ascii https://github.com/wojciech-graj/doom-ascii

ramses0 4mo ago

Just zellij instead of tmux, it's so much better!

allendoerfer 4mo ago
How?
- ramses0 4mo ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zellij https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zellij
  - archargelod 4mo ago
    That did not help. Seems like slightly different UI and written in Rust are two main "features" over tmux.
    - ramses0 4mo ago
      https://zellij.dev/tutorials/basic-functionality/ https://zellij.dev/tutorials/basic-functionality/ If you're already a tmux expert then zellij is probably no big deal, and the "written in rust" part is more of a red-herring than the headline. Firstly, it doesn't conflict with Ctrl-A by default (but I think that's actually `screen`), second it has mouse support, floating window, saved layouts, stacked tabs, session picker/manager, and take a look at the configuration mechanism: https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/blob/main/zellij-utils/assets/config/default.kdl https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/blob/main/zellij-utils/... ...for some reason it's just feels "super-sensible", comfortable, and allows a lot of flexibility. The concept of "booting layouts" (a very poor-man's `docker compose` ;-) is really interesting and powerful: https://zellij.dev/documentation/layouts.html https://zellij.dev/documentation/layouts.html https://zellij.dev/documentation/creating-a-layout.html https://zellij.dev/documentation/creating-a-layout.html ...and I've got like a total of like 1.5hrs of zellij usage under my belt. I've never been one to be super attached to screen/tmux, tried out byobu... none of them clicked in the same way with power, ease, and flexibility that zellij felt like it provided right away. Again: this may be telling a vim user about the power of emacs, in which case just nod and smile and go about your day, but since these terminal multiplexers are effectively "just UX", then a "slightly different UX" may end up being in actuality the whole compelling product!

dragonfax 4mo ago

Reminds me of word processing on DOS back in the 80s and early 90s. Pre-WYSIWYG.

vidarh 4mo ago
Especially with that colour palette it very much gives Word Perfect 5.1 vibes[1], which I suspect is either directly intentional, or indirectly so (inspiration from something inspired by WP) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#/media/File:Wordperfect-5.1-dos.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#/media/File:Wordpe...

daoboy 4mo ago

I'm desperately awaiting the perfect eink device for this. I've got a great writing setup on Obsidian that really works for me, a royal kludge mechanical keyboard...just waiting on the next gen of eink The Boox One Note Max was sooo close, but they almost immediately discontinued the product and probably won't be supporting it long. Suggestions are welcome

drakonka 4mo ago
I use the Onyx Boox Palma for a portable eink drafting setup. It's worked pretty well. I wrote about it here: https://liza.io/portable-writing-setup-with-onyx-boox-palma/ https://liza.io/portable-writing-setup-with-onyx-boox-palma/
- daoboy 4mo ago
  That's very similar to the setup I'm working on, including the stand. Thanks for sharing! One of the appealing features on the Note Max was the screen size (13.3"). How do you find working on such a small screen?
  - drakonka 4mo ago
    For me the small screen is fine as long as I can maintain the mindset of this being a _drafting_ tool, not an editing or structuring tool. I generally don't need to see more than a couple of sentences at a time, and my drafting process is almost stream-of-consciousness as I just focus on getting the words out. If I needed to navigate more to edit or regularly reference prior sections, the small screen would be a hindrance.
- stavros 4mo ago
  > The keyboad Perhaps you should have chosen a better one?!
  - drakonka 4mo ago
    I chose the keyboard I wanted :)

normie3000 4mo ago

> I'm trying to be more intentional with my tech choices. I want devices that do one thing really well, and that when I'm done with that one thing, I can put them away, and do something else. I don't want everything to follow me around everywhere. Sign me up. I would like an audio device which can play mp3, podcasts, internet radio. Bonus points if it supports some kind of cartridge system, size between credit card and audio cassette. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

CharlesW 4mo ago
You have hundreds of options for devices like this. Amazon alone shows 200, or well over 300 if you don't need live internet audio streams. You're about to respond: "But many of these use Android, and general purpose computers are too distracting for me." In that case, you'll need to forego live internet audio streams and buy a closed option with a radio receiver.
skydhash 4mo ago
> I would like an audio device which can play mp3, podcasts, internet radio. That internet radio is a whole magnitude of complexity, especially with the need for wifi (cellular?) if it needs to be portable. But there are options like specially modified android devices. I have the Shangling M0 with a 512GB card. I don’t even bother with converting my flac files. A nice other device is my kobo. It holds my entire fiction library with space to spare.
Rotundo 4mo ago
> I would like an audio device which can play mp3, podcasts, internet radio. Get a second-hand Apple iPod Touch, remove all apps you don't need. For just mp3 and podcasts: get an iPod Classic (or Video) and install Rockbox. Rockbox is amazing.

manaskarekar 4mo ago

Doogie Howser M.D. vibes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX0_Tuzr4wE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX0_Tuzr4wE

LeoPanthera 4mo ago

Consider wordgrinder, a console word processor, as distinct from a text editor. https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder

vidarh 4mo ago

I don't think I could go this far, because I'd have too many devices to switch between. But I like the overall idea. It also fits in well with something I used to think about a lot: Computers and the internet have caused a major shift toward hiding a lot of things that used to be much more apparent. E.g. your important papers would be in a physical file. Your books would be on the shelves. Your art on the walls. Visitors and family members could see them. Quite a few things I have in common with my late dad were a result of finding his books on the shelves as physical objects. Now most of the books I've bought (and a couple I've written) over the last couple of decades are on my phone or my computer, and not visible to anyone who doesn't know where to look. I've tried to be deliberate about showing my son the books I think he'll like, but those of my dads books, and manuscripts he wrote, that I ended up picking up and reading were only partially those he showed me - many more were books he had no inkling I'd like, or didn't think were age appropriate, that I stumbled on over the years. Moving all of those things into files on general purpose devices, away from physical objects, feels like it is unmooring us from parts of our immediate surroundings.

coffeefirst 4mo ago
I’ve started to undo it. Not everything, but I went back and bought used copies of every ebook that I wanted to keep forever. It was pretty cheap (many used books are $1) and feels good to have my full library browsable and free from any platform or company.
jimbokun 4mo ago
There’s also a distinct joy of wondering through a library looking at the spines of books on the shelves, occasionally pulling one down to scan the table of contents, and taking one or a few of those to a table to read a couple pages…

dangus 4mo ago

I like the idea of the setup and the philosophy behind it but I don’t like the implementation as much. If I’m spending a lot of time with text I’d really like the text and editor to have a much better aesthetic appearance than what I’m seeing here. I also think having something with graphical capability is nice to have but I know that’s a preference thing. For me, a mouse is a valuable tool in a text editor even if that usage is occasional. I also think there is a lot of manual setup of things like keyboard brightness controls and battery status that are already built in to every mainstream Linux distro imaginable. I would have gone about it in some other way like: 1. Install Fedora/Linux Mint/whatever 2. Make a login script that opens Obsidian or an editor of choice upon login and puts it in full screen mode. 3. Hide the KDE taskbar and/or just choose a highly minimal window manager. 4. Done.

fsckboy 4mo ago

HN deletes certain words at the beginnings of submitted titles: could we add "It's time to talk about" and potentially also "my"?

kwertyoowiyop 4mo ago
What we talk about when we talk about… The unreasonable effectiveness of… All you need is…
ramon156 4mo ago
I kinda like it. I'd even do something like "its time everyone talks about ..." As long as you don't take yourself too serious, people won't either

chungusamongus 4mo ago

The way people are coping with the current hellscape that is 2026 is interesting to me. Somehow, it always seems to be internalization. Like, if only I can lock in using this distraction free method, if only I start buying more physical media, if only I use a dumb phone and an mp3 player for my music, etc. etc., somehow that will resolve the intractable shitstorm happening right now. And none of that is even going to be a drop in the ocean in terms of making your life better. Only collective action has the potential to do that at this stage.

bigyabai 4mo ago
> And none of that is even going to be a drop in the ocean in terms of making your life better. I disagree 100%. Collective action isn't ever going to persuade Apple or Google to correct course. Collective action has already failed to compel Microsoft for 30+ years. These companies picked their side and your bargaining has zero leverage if you continue to purchase their products and suffer their indignation. You can only improve your life by getting rid of disrespectful advertising and low-quality slopware. The victim mindset is a lazy lie, one that you tell yourself to justify a net negative lifestyle.
- chungusamongus 4mo ago
  The victim mindset? What about my initial statement implies that I perceive myself or others as victims? Sounds like projection.
  - infinitezest 4mo ago
    "You sound defensive"
  - bigyabai 4mo ago
    > What about my initial statement implies that I perceive myself or others as victims? >> The way people are coping >> the intractable shitstorm happening right now. >> a drop in the ocean in terms of making your life better.
4mo ago

em-bee 4mo ago

the key goal here seems to be to remove temptation. for me just switching to a virtual console and firing up vim there would be enough because switching back to the gui would involve typing a long password which i believe for me would be deterrent enough to not keep switching on a whim. if you are not as easily tempted then running a terminal in fullscreen might just be enough.

stavros 4mo ago

Jesus christ I cannot believe it took this article for me to realize after so many years that leaving the root password empty would set my user up for sudo. Every single installation, the first thing I'd do is log in and lock root and give my user sudo! No more of that! Thanks, this article!

homeonthemtn 4mo ago

This is what Lao Tzu writer studio will be once the hardware version drops. A specialized writing deck akin to a modern type writer but feature rich and sleeeeeek

salamander014 4mo ago

I've wanted to do this for a while. Thanks for detailing your setup! I hope one day I find the time to try it. I've also always yearned for more usability from just the command line. There's no tui spotify client, is there? Maybe I should break out my mp3 collection again... I'm trying to think of what else I'd really need to not need a GUI machine for my day to day. Maybe email? Lynx and other tui browsers are not usable on today's web. Maybe there's a subculture to find somewhere that also appreciates reader-mode / lack of javascript? If so anyone please lead me to the promise land!

qsort 4mo ago
It's hard to find the kind of person who likes both, but the ultimate CLI enabler is AI. Ironically, since the rise of actually useful agents I've been using less web and GUI stuff and more CLI. git, ssh, vim, tmux, psql, sqlite3, codex, claude. What more can I ask for? The "there's a unix pipeline for that" mentality that was technically true but ultimately impractical 5 years ago now works phenomenally well. I wouldn't go as far as removing the gui entirely from my machine, but I'm literally down to the modern web browser as the final holdout.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  I agree that UX in the LLM age has been woefully under explored. I feel like whole new paradigms are waiting to be explored, but right now everyone is just trying to shoehorn AI into a corner of existing UIs.
  - qsort 4mo ago
    100%. I use AI more than most and always with frontier models from OpenAI/Anthropic, but most of the AI features I see around are complete slop. Like why would I ever want to interact with slow, unresponsive JS popups and the cheapest tokens you could find when I'm already paying for actually good models? At the same time the chat paradigm is very undercooked for any use case that isn't Google-like.
mamcx 4mo ago

tedd4u 4mo ago

1) Cool! Only think I can recommend is using use a taller 4:3-ish screen (like a Framework) for this. You could maybe have two columns of text available. 2) More broadly, one tip I've found to reduce phone engagement is to set the phone to black & white only. It's significantly less interesting and prone to sucking you in. (You can do this on iOS & Android.)

hank808 4mo ago

"Writerdeck' or simple word processor? They were first sold in the 1960s or 70s. Why? Buy, not build I'm thinking.

kibwen 4mo ago
The author already had the hardware, better to not buy than to buy.
- hank808 4mo ago
  You're not gettin' the point. There's nothing here if you think about it for 10 seconds. Any ancient anything, could run vi, or vim, or Emacs, or friggin' wordstar, natively or via emulation or WHATEVER. There's nothing here.
  - McGlockenshire 4mo ago
    You seem to be missing the entire point of the exercise and perhaps you should go back and read the article again to understand what you're missing.
    - hank808 4mo ago
      Nopes. I'm strongly suggesting that we already had a frigging word for these things, that's also still valid AF today, and it's "word processor." Not f'n writerdeck or whatever. Dumb.
      - retired_account 4mo ago
        > valid AF Nope. We already had a frigging phrase for that, and it’s “completely valid”, not “valid AF” or “cromulent” or whatever. Dumb.

cl3misch 4mo ago

> I had to set my syncthing web GUI to be listening on all addresses instead of just 127.0.0.1. I don't love this approach, but again, this thing has nothing private on it. OP mentions SOCKS proxy but you can also just port-forward the one web ui port instead: ssh -nNT writerdeck -L 8484:localhost:8384 and visit http://localhost:8484 on your normal machine.

ChuckMcM 4mo ago

This is a really interesting system. I find that I end up using an iPad with all my PDFs as reference materials when I'm writing, it would be nice to attach an external monitor in 'portrait' mode which exclusively hosted a single application that could let me select PDFs from my collection and display them on the screen. Then with one unit I'd have what I needed in one place.

owenversteeg 4mo ago

I've accidentally made one of these; I broke X on an old thinkpad with Arch and never bothered to fix it. The problem for me is getting myself to actually use it. Most of the time, it sits there gathering dust. If anyone has tips for this I'd love to hear them.

cyberpunk 4mo ago

If anyone is considering using a computer like this, I'd recommend OpenBSD for it which genuinely has one of the prettiest console fonts. It just ... Looks nicer.. Yes, I'm sure you can configure the others to look nice too but shrug OOTB is pretty nice.

em-bee 4mo ago
what are the names of the fonts are they using? i found something here, but i am not sure if these are the right ones: https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/share/misc/pcvtfonts?sort=File https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/share/misc/pcvtfonts?sort=Fil...
- skydhash 4mo ago
  Those are fonts you can load with the vga driver. Anything recent will load with the drm driver (intel, amd) or framebuffer. This emulates a text mode (rasops) on a graphical surfaces (vga has dedicated text mode), and for that they use spleen. https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/wsfont?sort=File https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/wsfont?sort=File https://github.com/fcambus/spleen https://github.com/fcambus/spleen And yes, it’s quite nice.
  - em-bee 4mo ago
    awesome, thank you. i remember vga vs framebuffer, and the time when linux made the switch. i was there, many thousand days ago. i might even have recognized that had those files mentioned vga somewhere in the path or contents. spleen looks good. i am using gallant right now which is based on the old sparcstation console font: https://github.com/NanoBillion/gallant https://github.com/NanoBillion/gallant
treve 4mo ago
I've been wondering if I can somehow get the Toshiba Satellite VGA font back to today.

CobrastanJorji 4mo ago

This is an awesome setup. I like it, good job. That said, I do think there's a bit of irony to solving your "paying attention to writing" problem by setting up your OS from scratch, choosing to swap out the default networking stack, installing a novel flavor of your preferred text editor because you're "trying to get to know it a bit more," customizing your battery readouts, tweaking the login sequence, and then, after all that effort to make sure you'd have the perfect environment for uninterrupted writing sessions, installing tmux so that you'll be able to do multiple things at a time.

cgriswald 4mo ago
I went with paper and pen precisely because there was always more I wanted to do with my computer work flow.
- obsidianbases1 4mo ago
  Pen and paper for writing. Computer for editing.
  - sixtyj 4mo ago
    Paper notebook. I wouldn’t recommend loose sheets of paper. :) After 15 years of writing notes on loose sheets I would start differently :) Go Tim Ferris way - notebook where the first page is left for the table of contents, and number all even-numbered pages as first step.
    - obsidianbases1 4mo ago
      My thoughts are so all over the place that I've settled on 3x5 note cards. It also makes the transition to the computer much easier, because I can re-arrange them in a way that is somewhat organized before taking a picture that gets transcribed
      - SanjayMehta 4mo ago

qsort 4mo ago

Great to see Veronica at the top of HN. She's a great creator, highly recommend her content.

JKCalhoun 4mo ago
(Music creator too, ha ha.)

iib 4mo ago

If anyone wants to try this without the intricate setup, if you have a linux system, you most probably can just press Ctrl+Alt+F3 and drop into a tty console directly. To return, you have to press Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+F2. You also have multiple consoles, up until F12 probably. I used to use this a lot when trying for a less distracting desktop, just like in the original post.

SubiculumCode 4mo ago
Yes, and if you want it to boot directly into a tty mode run: sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target As an aside: on some of my computers it is Ctrl+Alt+F2 but on others it is Ctrl+Alt+F7 to return to graphical mode.
- TeMPOraL 4mo ago
  Maybe this have changed over the years, and I rarely if ever used these combinations to switch to TTY except for emergency (OOM, or window manager breakage), but on every Linux system I ever used, graphical mode was on (Ctrl+Alt+)F7.
  - embedding-shape 4mo ago
    Using CachyOS right now, gdm/mutter/gnome ended up on Ctrl+Alt+F1, I can't remember if it was crunchbang or some other older distribution, but been others too using various numbers. I agree F7 is most common though.
- spl757 4mo ago
  I'm a proverbial greybeard and Ctrl+Alt+F7 used to just be what you did to get back to your desktop GUI. FWIW, right now I'm typing this from Ubuntu Studio 24.04 and it's Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get back to the GUI. Ctrl+Alt+F1 shows you the bootup output scroll, +F3 to +F6 will give you a login prompt to drop into a shell. +F7 to +F12 just give me a blinking cursor un the upper right corner of the display. I'm kinda surprised only +F3 to +F6 give me a shell login. Three isn't that many.

tyleo 4mo ago

I use the same Mac to write that I use for everything else. But I find it’s more useful to disconnect from multiple screens and just use the laptop on my desk if I need to focus. Those idle screens taunt me with a desire to use them for Slack or Hacker News when I’m trying to work.

mateioo7 4mo ago

This article reminded me of something I've been thinking a lot these past few months, that is having my computer split in 2 modes: 1. work, having everything available in a desktop OS 2. personal, a console-only mode with a few basic functionalities I consider not time wasting: ebook reader, weather forecast, next sport events, 1 TV show episode per day, calculator, calendar, timer, etc Since I use the extremely configurable awesomewm window manager, this switch would not be hard to implement and have me locked (somehow) based on day of the week or time on work days. LE: actually, the console-only mode would be more of a menu-only one with something like rofi desktop [1]. Something very minimal and easy to use. [1] https://github.com/giomatfois62/rofi-desktop https://github.com/giomatfois62/rofi-desktop

sixtyj 4mo ago
I haven’t known awesomewm. Thumb up. As I switch between Win and Linux, I have found FancyWM for win10/11 that should do the similar. (Ofc you’ve to use mouse in Windows.)

btrettel 4mo ago

I had a similar setup in 2023, but the computer was reformatted after I moved. I wrote a HN comment about the setup before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792204 I liked it and intend to use a similar setup in the future. There were quite a few "rough edges", unfortunately. In retrospect, a tiling window manager would have been a better choice. I found Midnight Command to be great for this, with its integrated file manager, file viewer (mcview), editor (mcedit), and diff (mcdiff). I didn't realize how much I relied on a unified clipboard until I didn't have one any longer. mcedit's clipboard was a file (or one of them was?), so I had to adjust some workflows. The biggest problem came from my need to view a lot of PDF files. I had a framebuffer PDF viewer that was pretty clunky. It did not work with tmux and PDF files could not be opened directly from Midnight Commander as I recall. This specifically is why I'm thinking about a tiling window manager as I won't have to pick a clunky PDF viewer and the remainder will just work.

kaashif 4mo ago

This reads like someone with ADHD took Adderall and accidentally focused hard for a day on the wrong thing. It has happened to me. I guess if this writerdeck works persistently for many projects then fine. But if every 2 projects the writerdeck gets revamped then it seems like a way to get a dopamine hit or distract ones self. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't seem like it's a net benefit in terms of focus.

nicbou 4mo ago
Same. However, for a while, I did not need to work much, and indulging in such things was an absolute delight. It was entertainment, but it also benefited me when I actually worked.
cortesoft 4mo ago
> focused hard for a day on the wrong thing Entirely depends on what the author wanted to focus on. Who are we to say what is the right or wrong thing to focus on?
- TeMPOraL 4mo ago
  I built my whole career on focusing on the wrong thing. In fact, focusing on the right thing makes me slow down, struggle, and get bogged down with frustration. I still learn 10+x faster when focusing on the wrong thing, and after two decades of this, I now know I have to regularly focus on the wrong thing with passion - those are the moments I pick up knowledge and experience that, few months to years later, people pay me to apply to their problems.
  - napkin 4mo ago
    This is me. I’ve gamified it to the extent that, to control my passion, I play tricks to ensure that the right thing becomes the wrong thing. My brain must believe it is procrastinating. For example, I often don’t pay my bills (the money isn’t the issue). I have to have sufficient debts that they become convincing boogeymen. Work can’t feel like escape if there’s nothing to escape from.
  - 4mo ago

worik 4mo ago

Good idea X-Windows and it's ilk are awesome software. For a single purpose machine it is unnecessary I've been doing the same thing in different domains

rpastuszak 4mo ago

I’m working on one! It’s early stage, but it’s relatively low latency e paper writing tool with my writing tool Ensō. I’m calling it Writer’s Block. (I love carpentry and want it to look a bit like a wooden pencil case.) the prototype will be a literal log of wood (guess the name). It makes sense because the larger form factor allows for faster prototyping!

elias1233 4mo ago

Very interesting! But how do you display images?

em-bee 4mo ago
fbi - the framebuffer image viewer. various versions exist. there is also a webbrowser and a pdf viewer among other things. i figure the pdf viewer is especially handy for someone focused on writing. and the browser may be good enough to handle a blog...

UncleSlacky 4mo ago

Why not just use DOS? e.g.: https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos At least the laptops that can still run DOS natively tend to have fairly good keyboards...

dredmorbius 4mo ago
You'd have to find a suitable editor. For a long time I had a copy of Wordperfect 4.x which I'd fire up occasionally under either DOSEmu or FreeDOS. Among other disappointments: - I've forgotten virtually all my WP muscle-memory. Vim is where it's at. (I was once quite proficient at WP, but the last time I used it significantly was well over 30 years ago.) - I find DOS apps tend to play poorly with any screen resolution other than 80x24 or so. I prefer more information density, but even running a console (rather than a terminal app) the experience tends to be subpar. That said, for someone with familiarity with the apps and not too picky about resolution, that's an option.
- alexhans 4mo ago
  When I saw this post I immediately thought of WordPerfect. It had such a pleasant interface for that time. But yeah, one of the things made me go for vim over Emacs a long time ago was its relationship with touch typing and not leaving the home row with the vim modes. Learn Vim script the hard way [1], even if you didn't end up writing any actual vim script, was a game changer in terms of understanding the semantics. [1] - https://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/ https://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/ was
  - lproven 4mo ago
    > When I saw this post I immediately thought of WordPerfect. The final DOS WordPerfect works wonderfully on even early 21st century kit. But it's not free. WordPerfect still exists and it's on sale. So, in USB-DOS, I included WPEDIT, the WordPerfect plain text editor, which has the same UI but no formatting.
- lproven 4mo ago

risingsubmarine 4mo ago

Has me thinking about laser-focused task alternatives. WorldDeck : 3D art / game development GengoDeck : Japanese Immersion / Studying TuneDeck : Making music. SteamDeck : A deck for... oh I think this idea is taken. Hmm. No i think I'll get back to working... for now.

gib444 4mo ago

Can I tangent to some love for the Debian TUI installer? Just seeing it evokes such pleasing thoughts. I don't think it's changed a whole lot in at least 10 years, maybe more. I think it's pretty well designed in terms of UX. I have never seen it crash or bug out. Even the graphical version is excellent. They've resisted using a web view, thank god (giving you the side eye, Fedora) A lot of respect and love for Debian!

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ungreased0675 4mo ago

I recently installed Alpine Linux as part of a side quest and was blown away by just how fast it was without running a GUI or loading up a bunch of background programs. It was so fast a little voice has been telling me my daily driver laptop should run a minimal Linux distribution like Alpine.

lproven 4mo ago
It's quite remarkable, isn't it? It is how Linux used to be in the 1990s: tiny, simple, blindingly fast compared to the big lumbering commercial OSes... ... Which now are also Linux. Which is terribly terribly sad.
- OriginalPenguin 4mo ago
  They weren’t blindingly fast then. The hardware was so much slower in the 90s. It’s difficult to remember just how slow a 5400rpm hard drive was.
  - lproven 4mo ago
    Oh no it isn't. I started before floppy disks were widespread. Floppies were sooooooo good after tape cassettes. :-)

richardlblair 4mo ago

I find fhe discourse here hilarious. Haven't most of us built our skillsets and careers out of side quests? There is so much I wouldn't know or understand if I didn't go down the odd rabit hole.

kaashif 4mo ago
I think going down side quests is good, that's how I learnt lots of what I know. But if my goal was to run daily and my first step was to make an open source step tracker with a raspberry pi dock...
meribold 4mo ago
Lots of comments are also massively overestimating the amount of time/effort that creating this setup required.

choilive 4mo ago

Soooo.. not to sound like a luddite but to me the best dedicated writing device for me has been just pen and a notebook or a typewriter. There are surprisingly many "portable" typewriter options out there (including electronic ones).

teruakohatu 4mo ago
> There are surprisingly many "portable" typewriter options out there (including electronic ones). An odd laptop ($0) with free software ($0) makes more sense than buying another electronic device.
- choilive 4mo ago
  If you don't value your time sure. Pen and paper is also basically free and even simpler with no setup time..
  - archargelod 4mo ago
    Handwriting or using a typewriter is great if you're writing something solely for enjoyment of the process. But if you want to store, organize and use any of your writing in the future - you have to go digital.

caioricciuti 4mo ago

I keep gravitating toward similar setups. Once you remove the option to fiddle with fonts and layouts, you're left with just the writing. Console-only Debian on an old laptop is about as distraction-free as it gets without going full typewriter.

rrvsh 4mo ago
The only thing holding me back from tty as desktop environment is terminal alt modes - i find it annoying when nvim leaves behind a ghost of itself
- skydhash 4mo ago
  Doesn’t tmux support alternate screen. You could run everything in a tmux session and get alternate screen that way.
  - rrvsh 4mo ago
    ah, great idea. I stopped using a multiplexer when i switched to using a terminal with tabs - thank you for the tip

altairprime 4mo ago

Gosh, this is everything I miss about my FreeBSD Vaio back in the day. Huh. Well. Thanks for the memories and heartily endorsing this based on past experience (before having a writing focus need, and so I’d never connected the dots)!

andai 4mo ago

A couple years ago I was having difficulty working (couldn't get ADHD meds due to unspecified global calamity). I decided that unproductivity was unacceptable and so I simply engineered out the failure modes. 1. If I skipped a day on my project, the chance of catastrophic derailment increased exponentially. So I decided I had to work on it every day. (But only for an hour, to make it easy.) 2. If I waited until later in the day to begin working, the chance that I would miss a day increased exponentially. So I decided I had to work as soon as I woke up. 3. If I connected to the internet while working, the chance that I got derailed increased exponentially. So I just turned off my router and phone the night before. (Good for sleep hygiene, I did it an hour before bed and found that I could actually concentrate on paper books again, with the infinite Satans removed from my life. What a concept.) Obviously unplugging your router is going to piss off your housemates, so a good alternative is buying a Wifi repeater for $10 and putting your devices on that. (You can just put them in airplane mode, of course -- but I find the physical ritual of yanking the damn thing out of the wall has something special to it.)

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pickleballcourt 4mo ago

Is this supposed to replicate the typewriter experience?

Eighth 4mo ago

There's a lot of 'But what about' in the comments. I think it's a delightful setup. I love simplicity and tools that do one thing well.

deadbabe 4mo ago

I think what would really make a nice writerdeck is an E-ink screen. Would be perfect for purely text based interface.

wolvoleo 4mo ago
Yes and you could sit outside in nature

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desireco42 4mo ago

Look, it does look like overkill but I totally understand you and where you are coming from... I managed to publish my first book, second getting final review and third one is in editing... fully connected. AI came up with all the names for the characters, did a research on places and such. Huge help. I did check it all. For example a name AI claimed was French, totally was German and had to be replaced, but otherwise it is of huge help in writing if used correctly. But here is a thing that made the most difference. Dictation. And not into dumb mac or phone transcriber. I use Typeless and used Superwhispt before, Typeless has amazing keyboard replacement and understand Serbian and transcribe it to English with minimal issues. I dictate in my own Obsidian vault, to Inbox, which is then processed and sorted out by SidianSidekicks service (I am the founder). I look weird because I am talking to myself everywhere I go, but it is amazingly productive.

tekawade 4mo ago

This is awesome and inspiring. I am almost always setup Linux as a server (command line only). Unless until I have need to have native gui. If needed ‘sshd’ to use from other machines. Here are some more recommendations (not my repos): 1. helix-editor (rust based lightweight and fast) 2. Starship.sh (command line) 3. Nerd fonts (not sure how It will work only used with remote systems) 4. Zellij (cause it’s rust based not strong argument here) 5. Biased for ‘zsh’ too

bitmasher9 4mo ago

I was really hoping to learn more about the actual writing process than someone’s Linux setup. It’s a bit too complicated for my taste, I can bang out about a thousand words an hour in a chrome tab, given a sufficient source of coffee and the opportunity to silence non-urgent notifications. I’m specifically struggling with large project editing. I have multiple projects that are hundreds of pages long, but need much more editorial efforts before they see the light of day. Editing anything longer than 10 pages feels like pulling teeth, so I end up underpublished.

throw10920 4mo ago

There's a pattern that I notice a lot on HN. "To solve this problem, I engineered an entire system from scratch." Response: "That's a cool solution. But, isn't it a lot more work than this straightforward solution?" (the user is right - the complicated solution is massively more work than the straightforward one) Response: "Yes, but it's a cool project - it's OK to not be the most efficient all the time." (also right - there's nothing wrong with doing projects with zero utility just for the fun of it, and this one actually does have some use) It seems like there's a bifurcation of expectations. Some people want to do a project, and they take a thin justification as an excuse to do so. Other people really do want to solve a problem, but they get mired in perfectionism and overengineering, or aren't even aware of the simpler solution. Conflation between these two categories keeps many HN threads gainfully employed. (worth noting that for people in the latter category, pointing out "there's this simpler solution" can be incredibly helpful, because they simply might not know that it exists, or maybe they need a little bit of pushing to realize that they're overengineering things and that they got stuck in a place that they don't actually want to be in. this has been me, many many times)

fcarraldo 4mo ago
Forums are made up of many individual people who all have their own perspectives. It is not all black and white, zero sum, good or bad.
- throw10920 4mo ago
  Right, I'm not saying any of those latter things. It's just interesting to note patterns, and sometimes people are actually in a local minimum that they appreciate being pushed out of.
simpaticoder 4mo ago
You didn't describe, but rather demonstrated, another aspect of the pattern which is that someone inevitably "goes meta" and remarks on the pattern - and usually someone points out that it's "not black and white" and the sub-thread decays into muttering obscurity with no real conclusion or insight. Personally I've come to see this as a niche form of "exuberance of the young" which is itself wasteful in the strictest sense, but is more generously characterized as a side-effect of other, hopefully more important personal maturation effects.

troad 4mo ago

It's interesting to me how few people seem willing to just turn off notifications. I'm all on board with setting up a retro machine for fun, but if one wants to focus on writing, there are ways to achieve this that don't require the sacrifice of good font rendering, comfortable colours, etc. The fact that the Music app notifies you of the new song is not some immovable law of nature...

tonyedgecombe 4mo ago
That still leaves the browser a couple of keypresses away which is too close for many.

bitwize 4mo ago

Before dunking on this lady for rolling her own writerdeck Linux distro, consider that I see advertisements for rather weaksauce devices, often with tiny LCD or, if they're posh, e-paper screens and very limited functionality compared to something like vim, for between $500 and $1200 USD. For an electric typewriter whose entire value proposition could have been achieved with a DOS PC. Veronica put a used laptop to work achieving much the same thing for next to nothing, except her time of course. It's not reverse-engineering an obscure Space Shuttle computer, but it's the kind of effort I think we want to reward on a site called Hacker News.

crionuke 4mo ago

I have thought I need similar setup but for mobile to work on text notes, legacy iphone or something would be nice

LAC-Tech 4mo ago

I've wanted to do this for general productivty; if I could find a good LLM to give me links I could forgo even a TUI web browser. perfect dev machine. The default linux TTY is pretty barebones though. No unicode, and lots of TUI apps expect 256 colours. KMSCON looks like an interesting solution.

MomsAVoxell 4mo ago

I have been writing for some time now, on a very large variety of devices, and my current go-to is an iPad and keyboard .. at various times the smart thingy (from Apple) .. but also often now lately with a Bluetooth logi .. just to give the joints a bit of variety as they get older and crankier .. I do miss the old typewriter. Not so much the selectric era, but more the well-balanced instrumentation of a manual. Still, there is a lot to be said for the amber glow of full-screened vim session on such a portable device. The one thing I truly wish for, is a solar-powered writerdeck, i.e. 100% off grid, forever. Just like the good ol’ typewriter ..

rldjbpin 4mo ago

interesting choice to use syncthing instead of rsync, given the OP is already comfortable with it. equally curious to see why it was not even mentioned nor discussed for regular readers/viewers. my main concern with the setup was with the additional config required to make sure sleep states and other hw annoyances are in check. but it does help to have a well-supported linux machine as a base!

kowbell 4mo ago
I install syncthing on ~all my devices and haven't yet touched rsync. Some reasons I prefer it: 1. It's automatic (sure, scripting regular rsync syncs probably isn't hard, but...) 2. It's p2p across all my devices (which from what I understand is not how rsync operates) So as long as my laptop and my desktop are both turned on I can trust they're always fully up-to-sync with each other, and in my experience they always are.
- rldjbpin 4mo ago
  as a personal syncthing user, i get it. although its clients in non-linux os can be better, especially on ios. on the other hand, the accompanying video did mention rsync and a future video on syncthing, which might shed some more light on this decision.

hambes 4mo ago

I've always wanted to do this, but can't get over the linux tty only supporting 256 colors. If I could get that higher and maybe add unicode support, I'd love to go tty only.

SeattleAntifa 4mo ago

No.

nottorp 4mo ago

All it's missing is WordPerfect 5.1 in DosBox!

rav3ndust 4mo ago

i saw this video the other day on youtube (veronica's yt channel is great if you haven't watched!), and cool to see other people doing it as well. it reminded me of a similar setup i have, dubbed 'protocol7', which is a tty-only setup tailored for this kind of thing and for use on servers/headless pi setups. i use it for writing, intentional reading/browsing via lynx, managing gemini capsules (and reading gemini capsules - thank you amfora!), and just all-round "cozy computing". tmux-heavy, and (to me) very comfortable to use. my current 'protocol7' machine is my trusty old thinkpad x200. :)

jeffrallen 4mo ago

Wonder if Lynx can connect to ChatGPT. <evil wink>

ewrgrghyeuhy 4mo ago

fuzix (or serenityOS/Haiku)+mechanical or magnetic keyboard 60-80% but with home, arrow, ins, pgup-down del. And a week of working time on one charge

ksd482 4mo ago

Nowhere it mentioned anything about saving the progress. Can someone comment on if there's a way to autosave the files on every keystroke?

linux2647 4mo ago
Vim swap files (.swp) are periodically saved out to disk. In the event of a crash, reopening a file will present you with a screen asking if you want to recover the file. I doubt it’s character by character, but I’m sure vim has a setting to speed it up

SanjayMehta 4mo ago

TLDR: "I installed a text only Linux on a laptop"

cassidoo 4mo ago

I also made a writerdeck! They are the best: https://cassidoo.co/post/micro-journal/ https://cassidoo.co/post/micro-journal/

thewisenerd 4mo ago

on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7vFdy4BEAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7vFdy4BEAY not sure if i saw the link in the blog; but the youtube video attaches TFA as the companion blog post.

realaaa 4mo ago

wow all that is music to my ears ! and yes, attention problem is too real these days, for most of us - thanks for sharing this !