I have thought I need similar setup but for mobile to work on text notes, legacy iphone or something would be nice
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.
It it reminds me of a lot of friends who wanted to "start blogging" and their first step was writing a new static site system from scratch.
Or when I wanted to write a novel and went into world-building fantasy enciclopedia for two years... I didn't even pass the page 2 of the novel, lol. Now it's all forgotten.
Or friends who want to "make a game" and their first step is writing game engine from scratch.
I wouldn't be surprised if programmers had, collectively, written more game engines than actual games.
Oh, that's exactly what I do. My rule is: one game, one engine. It's based on whatever the OS provides of course, or an abstraction layer like SDL, but everything above that is my own, tailored specifically to the game at hand.
But how am I supposed to be productive writing blogposts unless I can copy my favorite Clojure templating library into Nix first, so I can have completely statically and reproducible blog posts building from markdown together with the nicest type of templating?
If we're all being honest, I'd rather read the Clojure/Nix templating blogpost instead of the 10,000th "why human interaction is important" bearblog essay.
yeah, part of my current writing push was made more successful by two things:
* I am not allowed to use a blogging system I wrote. (Really, I've written three or four at this point and need to stop, and there are plenty of existing systems that still align with my idiosyncratic constraints.)
* The blog must not have any meta content about blog tooling.
(I cheated a little on the latter by having an extra "site" blog for that - which lets me get the words out but doesn't "count" for the writing goal. A useful outlet, but it meant an extra month or so before "real writing" outnumbered meta writing :-)
But then they have something to write about as their first post.
It's very convenient to have a first project all ready to blog about, fresh in your mind and everything:D
I think writing a static site generator was the first moment I felt like I may be serious about this programming thing.
Those losers who still need Perl on their servers better be ready for a mind explosion
...thought, me back in (too lazy to look up which year it was). I probably published like two things with it, spent (what felt like) a million person hours on it, just to abandon it and use Textpattern.
I think it is great to combine two personal projects into one!
For me, I can't learn anything unless I actually have a purpose for it. So if I wanted to learn how to write a static site system, I would also need to think of a reason I need one!
one of my goals is to work on the server platform that i am using for my websites. i want to write a blog, but i am using that desire to push myself to work on the platform, so i need to complete that blog interface first.
I feel so called out ^_^
*whistles innocently*
That's how most of us started blogging lol
Yeah, I cobbled together an SSG in Guile back in the day.
I'd agree, but in this case they were able to write a blog post that got (as of now) 300+ points and 200+ comments with the content of their work.
This is a thing I see everywhere. It’s the carpenter who mostly just builds jigs and french cleats for their workshop. Or the programmer who spends far too much time obsessing over what keyboard and font to use.
“Yak shaving”
It’s a classic move.
Start a new diet, so you join a gym and or buy a bunch of workout stuff.
I won’t knock it though. An important minority of my yak-shaving endeavors have led to long term positive outcomes.
I guess I will setup something similar or more complex. But there are alternatives:
"George R.R. Martin Writes on a DOS-Based Word Processor From the 1980s". No internet, no multi tasking.
I went with paper and pen precisely because there was always more I wanted to do with my computer work flow.
When I need to write something, and I have a computer, and something is inconvenient, I can quickly (well, within minutes, maybe 30 of them) alter it to my liking, and return to writing.
When I only have a pen and paper (which I used extensively for writing at school), many things may be inconvenient, but there's no way to fix it. This may turn into a source of a low-key stress, and interfere with my writing much more than tweaking a computer would.
I use Emacs, an ultimate tweaker's tool, for writing every day. Last time I had to tweak something in it was a few weeks ago, and it took maybe 2-3 minutes. It's a small price to pay for a tool that just does what you need, when you need it, with zero mental load, and zero frustration.
For my two main uses pen and paper has two opposite effects. For creative writing it is freeing because it isn’t the last stop but I don’t have to worry about format or placement or anything. I can just go. Typing has a sort of “technical” feel for me, probably due to code, email, and to some degree comments.
For notes during study pen and paper are constraining and force me to organize the thoughts in my mind first and then commit them. Mistakes needing to be corrected here is good: It reminds me what I misunderstood.
But, like the sibling poster, the writing goes onto the computer for later editing.
What in the world do you need to be able to write with pen and paper?
It’s pretty much the single function of pen and paper.
Pen and paper for writing. Computer for editing.
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.
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
You might want to check out Scrivener (Mac and Windows). I use that in lieu of note cards. The cork board function lets you re-arrange text and media to your hearts content and then compile the final output to Word, PDF whatever. It's designed for non-linear writing.
I hate handwriting with a passion. I have my whole life. I have horrible handwriting and my hand gets sore 5 seconds after I start writing.
I am sure it is because I don't hold my pen/pencil correctly, but I think after 43 years I am not going to suddenly fix that.
Me too. And I can type so much faster and without thinking about it than I can write.
I've had many writing classes in school and different holders for the pen etc but I never managed to improve at all. Writing is just not for everyone.
You sound likely to have dysgraphia, based on the fact I have all the same aspects and a dysgraphia diagnosis.
I am similar. If I physically write a couple times a week, my hand adapts though. It's a skill like any other.
Fountain pens are nice too since you don't need any pressure.
My writing looks a lot better if I just force myself to slow down and be deliberate, but honestly it's a constant battle. I'd definitely benefit from practicing penmanship on it's own.
Worth mentioning - for a long time, I found my handwriting messy AND my hand would tire out. When I was about a teen-ager, I decided to write in call-caps, very clearly. I've been doing that for a long time now, and worth giving a try.
teen-ager? call-caps? Cursive (several hundred years old) fixes this.. all-capitals(caps) or block-caps makes writing more laborious, possibly easier to read (which is why it used to be requested on hand-written forms?)
how did you decide which pens to go with?
Slow down. I’m still deciding on what size of notebook and whether I go dotted or blank.
You want to play some old classic games so you spend five days getting a Raspberry Pi set up just right with Retroarch and then when it's setup just right you do something else.
A good test of your focus on writing is if you can use a boring tool like Substack, Wordpress, Blogger or Github pages (vanilla out of the box ssg setup) and just write.
That said this one did write something. But I'd say for anyone else writr 10000+ words on whatever before a single word on your setup.
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.
> 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?
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.
Structured procrastination [1, 2] was invented full 30 yeas ago, and works very well, given some skill.
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.
I love this. Feel like I’m the same way. I also feel like some of this “focusing on the wrong thing” is sharpening the saw, preparing my mind and my environment for greater productivity. As long as I eventually return to the right things.
> Who are we to say what is the right or wrong thing to focus on?
Just observers pointing out that her stated goal was "to write more." If she uses the writerdeck as-is for a couple years, then, she was one of those rare people that discovered an actual single structural obstacle that stood between her and her goal, and then solved it in one fell swoop.
As an ADHD guy, I completely understand the cycle: have a thing you wish you did more, identify some "obstacles" between you and the thing, or just some friction points, and then really enjoy the process of fixing all those things. Then doing the originally desired thing in my perfect new environment and reveling in the fruits of my labor for a glorious day... Or hour. Skyrim modpacks, emacs configs, keyboard setups, OS tweaking, camping gear fiddling, pen and paper gear fiddling.
That's life, it's valid, whatever. I did find though that there's more effective ways to actually do the things I originally stated I want to do, and the more effective ways seem to be a bit more brute force. So for example, trying to quit my reddit addiction, I tried all the little tricks, little apps that track time, browser extensions, host file blocking, etc. The most long term effective strategy though was asking myself, "am I really going to go my whole life without a reddit-free week?" And then escalating that to a month and so on. Basically escalating cold turkey. I wrote about it - https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/how-to-quit-social-media/
Learning mandarin, was what pushed me over the edge of my plateau the fancy apps I kept trying, all the books I was buying, the really slick annotation setup I had on my Boox? Nope, daily simple Anki deck fed by a spreadsheet combined with going to the south more where people don't speak English that much.
To be fair some of my fiddling has resulted in cool outcomes. The handwriting experiments all finally concluded after years of device fiddling onto a specific kokyu notebook size, a specific journal, and a specific set of pens, all of which I own enough to last a while now. My workout tweaking led to a fun form of cardio where I ruck with a lot of weight, a 360 camera sticking out of my bag, and some OSM apps open, letting me ruck around for hours without getting bored while I do OSM contributions. And lo, my emacs tweaking seems to have finally settled down into a config set that for coding hasn't changed for years, though the note taking/ journaling one did get revamped earlier this year so it's not done.
Can you share more about your journal specifics, and Anki deck + spreadsheet? Thanks!
Anki I haven't shared online yet, but for writing practice I just grabbed a "top 5k most common characters" deck online, and then reading/listening/speaking, I just chuck words into pleco and then use its build in flashcards system (it can use anki as a backend if you want).
Also re: journaling, I do a handwritten journal + calendar in a Hobonichi, but those don't have enough spare paper for day to day notes and book notes. For that I use kokuyo 80 sheet 8mm ruled w dot lines, soft ring, 148mmx105mm which is basically the exact same size as my Kobo bw, genuinely pocket sized.
For daily todo list it's a mnemosyne... 192? Is that the model name? They're relatively tall but extremely tall pocket notebooks. Basically I'm constantly strapped with hella paper.
What a strangely hostile thing to say to somebody's earnest post about their setup.
I don't think it was meant to be hostile. It is a pattern I always find myself repeating personally. I think they just recognised it as something they do themselves.
If I feel like I have too many things to do, I can end up installing all sorts of todo list apps instead of doing the things. When I feel like a need a nap, I look up optimal nap times, end up reading stuff and then realising I missed the window I could have had a nap in.
I've set up vimwiki and loads of other note taking type apps (or knowledge management apps as they are often called now) and I export my notes from one system into another, and forget to use it.
Flatly: “How dare you lovingly handcraft a bespoke wordworking tool when you could have written a short story instead! We hackers would never spend time improving our circumstances to create more efficient flow states going forward rather than just drearily producing output less efficiently!”
Well if it's strangely hostile I'm sorry but "I need to focus on writing so I spent a few days stripping down a Linux distro" seems pretty disconnected.
I mean it's a fun project!
But it really reminds me of something I would do that isn't entirely positive.
Disconnected from what?
The reason it feels hostile is because you led with a joke about the whole thing being a big mistake, but also that the author wrote about a thing they built to solve a problem they had and ended their post by saying that it worked, and you've popped up to pitch that it might not work.
There isn't any joke in my comment. Apologies for the confusion.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
even worse! you can start a Emacs client evaluate (menu-bar-mode -1) and (tool-bar-mode -1) and put it on full screen
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.
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.
I do think it might be a more recent change related to a)gnome display manager, and b)systemd.
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.
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.
I even added this as an option in my Grub menu.
you missed the fbcon thing
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.
Reviews are wildly polarised.
* Some folks find it to be the best thing ever [long battery life, the new patch makes the eink surprisingly fastly responsive, decent keyboard, no distractions]
* While others find it terrible [it's still eink, that's a lot of money for a device that doesn't actually do much]
Looks great but the price is pretty insane, and really the eink should be a lot bigger. So much wasted space on the bezels.
That looks really cool, but that price point. I could get a Steam Deck + travel keyboard and still come out ahead.
Is that the true price for a low volume, niche product? Eink monopoly continues to make the world worse?
Looked it up, and the original One Laptop per Child came in around $200
I was gifted a Traveler several years ago. It is overpriced and bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality. You can read and write off of it via USB, but it doesn't actually use a true filesystem for your text files, it writes them into the main app's sqlite DB, which in the past has had data loss issues.
My version uses ancient releases of Node and React for the UI for some horrible reason, and it is painfully slow.
I've rooted mine and have it as a project to look at the new OS and decide what to do with it, but if I had the cash I'd look elsewhere.
> bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality.
This is why I don't own a Freewrite. It should be such a simple device, but they found a way to make it complicated and lock it into their proprietary ecosystem. No thanks.
That homebrew page is pure gold. Thank you for the suggestion!
The Pomera line of devices from the Japanese company "King Jim" (yeah, I don't know) are really nice from a features point of view: limited enough to stay out of your way when you're writing, functional enough to enable the basic workflows you'd expect e.g. basic file management, SD card/USB transfers (something that many/most/all Western boutique writing devices like the Freewrite somehow didn't support well or at all last time I checked). Somewhere I have a funky e-ink Pomera thing with a folding keyboard that I did a lot of writing on, and later I bought a DM250, which is not e-ink but works pretty much the same, and now has a US version. I recommend it.
Onyx iterates on its BOOX tablets fairly rapidly, but tends to continuously offer something in various size classifications. You'll find 13.3" tablets typically named as "Max" something or other.
I've had a previous iteration of their 13.3" tablet, the Max Lumi. Slightly lower resolution, and has a frontlight. It is a very nice display, though with an Android OS which I see as a net negative.
I'd really like an e-ink display option for the Framework 12" or 13" laptop.
My dream device is the "Solar A5 e-ink computer" - It's A5-sized laptop, so it fits in a leather zipped case for journals. If you're familiar with HP Journadas / Sony Vaios from early 2000s, that's roughly the form factor. There's a solar panel on the back of the screen / outside of the enclosure. The screen is e-ink, and the operating system is Linux Mint Debian Edition. For console mode, a good "writing station" applications are "mc" (Midnight Commander) and "ranger" - simple GUI for editing text in folders, like a blog/knowledge base.
Some challenges I've experienced: (1) Can't find A5-sized e-ink screens that accept HDMI as an input, (2) It would be cool to use a common Android phone, since there are many around. RaspberryPI is an option. Honestly, would love the simplest portable device that runs Debian Stable on a battery, (3) I have NOT been able to find small, A5-sized keyboards. Most small keyboards are cheap plastic bluetooth junk.
If anyone would like to seriously rally around this, let's talk'bout it. My vision for this laptop has always been "10:00 AM Austin Texas, sitting at a patio bar in direct sun, journalling/coding/writing". I have not been able to find any computer device that satisfies that situation, so there is obviously a market niche.
I use a Bigme Hibreak Pro eink phone, nix-on-droid/ssh to home server over tailscale, and a foldable keyboard, to have my coding setup with me and not be tied to where I can carry a laptop.
For foldable keyboards, if they are flimsy or stable matters.
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?
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.
> The keyboad
Perhaps you should have chosen a better one?!
I chose the keyboard I wanted :)
It was a joke on the typo.
Hahaha I missed that completely, sorry.
...Now I kind of don't want to fix it :D
make the "r" a link to this discussion thread. btw you made the typo twice :-)
If you want something you can use today with a Kindle or other e-reader I made an app for this https://solarwriter.msol.io
Ideally, somebody like Modos would create a replacement e-ink display for the Framework.
[dead]
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.
Nothing opposes a setup like this to collective action. Given that most of modern technology or at least most of the internet is built to actively distract you as much as possible to extract profit, it's just a sane choice to disconnect from this every now and again if you want to work on things that actually matter. And this can totally include things that are for the collective good, and in collective efforts.
It just seems like copium to me. The consolation prize is we get to come up with niche lifestyle preferences to cut out the distractions. We can fine tune our lives to increase productivity. More and more optimization until we're just machines. And then people will use that as a way to feel superior to the sheep who continue to scroll tiktok.
This is a pretty hyperbolic description of someone customizing an old laptop to work the way she wants it to work.
Not really. I only watch movies on my TV, play game on my PS4, and read novels on my Kobo. It’s not about productivity. Having a device tied to an activity is nice for attention and mental load.
You sound defensive.
WTF is this comment suppose to mean? You're telling me a union organizer working to better the material lives of their community is "coping" by distracting themselves from corporate social media?
Some people merely have the urge to create -- For those people, it has little to do with coping. They would like a distraction free environment regardless.
I'm certainly one of those people :)
It's very meditative to solely focus on the one thing in front of you.
I bought an iPod again this year, and started buying MP3s instead of streaming songs.
It's so nice to sit in a chair, close my eyes, and listen to a soundtrack or an old album.
I'm getting old.
There's just more to understand about the music now.
I've enjoyed the in-between of buying music on bandcamp.
Me, seeing someone eating ice cream: “Here is one of several copies of The Permanent Revolution that I keep on my person for this exact situation”
It's not ice cream though. Quite the opposite. It's this notion that puritanical self discipline at the individual level will somehow get us out of this. It won't.
Effective collective action is impossible without both real self discipline and meaningful engagement in life.
Your point has value to the extent that it’s reminding people we can’t just retreat into personal satisfactions.
But to the extent that it pooh poohs self-discipline or joyfully engaged attention, it’s totally wrong. The necessary practice starts with these things and then grows social and organized.
The social and organizing phase is usually less scoldy and pugilistic than some of your commentary here, too.
OP mentioned owning more than one computer in the post. They could spend all of their time watching vtubers stream gacha games when they’re not writing for all we know
That's a total non sequitur.
Seems a little more non sequitur to try to shoehorn “check out this neat thing I did with an old laptop” into the April Theses though
If it’s something like chocolate brownie truffle ice cream, that’s clearly a bourgeois citizen who needs their consciousness raised.
> Only collective action has the potential to do that at this stage.
Nothing resolves the shit storm, but it is absolutely possible to not be in it. Don't need collective action for that.
> Only collective action has the potential to do that at this stage.
Yes in terms of surviving the full shit storm, and yes in terms of deriving security and comfort from community, but the things you mentioned are all valid steps on a path to joining the community of people working together on the issue you're trying to solo cope with.
Example: lately those paying attention here in Taiwan are getting the sense that our internet is fragile, and start looking into solutions for that. Many end up at reticulum and meshtastic. They might fiddle a bit, maybe get a Lora radio or whatever, but regardless, this weekend is g0v summit, where there's a lot of talks and a booth about this exact thing, and yesterday a lot of the people I met attending the talks or visiting the booth are brand new to this. But now they're in the scene, plugged in with people that have been spending years tying solar Lora radios to the top of trees throughout the city.
Getting into offline music, you get to the stage where you start trying to find good quality music, and stumble into the soulseek community, or you start wondering more about modding your dumb secondhand hardware, stumble into the mod community. From either of those into the FOSS/open hardware scene, anti-IP scenes, "four thieves vinegar collective" types.
Basically, there's many paths.
You don't need to solve whats going on around you, just whatever works for you. The fact your chose the word "coping" says more about your mindset than those you're generalizing about.
You sound kinda defensive.
You've used this reply twice now.
Now it's your turn, comrade. Share your effective revolutionary strategy in more detail than "collective action." I've posted about mine here and there on this forum, it's a perfectly valid place for it.
And your copium is posting to HN explaining to everyone how they are Doing It Wrong.
I agree. Collective action can come in two shapes.
One is that enough individuals take action, and the things you list are that, an individual taking action. If enough individuals do it then goal accomplished.
The other is making our politicians force other individuals to do it.
IMO both are necessary. There's some things where decades have proven that individuals are too "weak" to resist the pull of their urges (and nevermind those urges have trillions of dollars of R&D to make them as strong as possible so it's an unfair battle).
> 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.
The victim mindset? What about my initial statement implies that I perceive myself or others as victims? Sounds like projection.
"You sound defensive"
> 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.
I consider it a good first step.
Of course people reach for individualized solutions first: We (Americans at least) live in a very individualized society.
But these individualized solutions still represent a shift in mindset, of people believing they have agency around how they use technological tools, and of people believing they should make those choices and not a company or the government. This seems very basic and self-evident to anyone who spends time on HN, but it is genuine progress for a lot of people.
Less than 1% of the population is going to do anything remotely close to any of these things. It's just a niche lifestyle preference.
Less than 1% of the population is going to engage in the kind of collective action you want them to.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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...
HN deletes certain words at the beginnings of submitted titles: could we add "It's time to talk about" and potentially also "my"?
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
What we talk about when we talk about…
The unreasonable effectiveness of…
All you need is…
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
At least the laptops that can still run DOS natively tend to have fairly good keyboards...
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.
Fonts, wifi
Reminds me of word processing on DOS back in the 80s and early 90s. Pre-WYSIWYG.
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)
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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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.
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
Doesn’t tmux support alternate screen. You could run everything in a tmux session and get alternate screen that way.
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)!
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!
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.
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.)
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).
> 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.
If you don't value your time sure. Pen and paper is also basically free and even simpler with no setup time..
"Writerdeck' or simple word processor? They were first sold in the 1960s or 70s. Why? Buy, not build I'm thinking.
The author already had the hardware, better to not buy than to buy.
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.
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.
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.
> valid AF
Nope. We already had a frigging phrase for that, and it’s “completely valid”, not “valid AF” or “cromulent” or whatever. Dumb.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been wondering if I can somehow get the Toshiba Satellite VGA font back to today.
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.
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.
Is this supposed to replicate the typewriter experience?
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.
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.
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.
Very interesting! But how do you display images?
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...
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.
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!
I think what would really make a nice writerdeck is an E-ink screen. Would be perfect for purely text based interface.
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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!
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
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
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.
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!
I have thought I need similar setup but for mobile to work on text notes, legacy iphone or something would be nice
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.
It it reminds me of a lot of friends who wanted to "start blogging" and their first step was writing a new static site system from scratch.
Or when I wanted to write a novel and went into world-building fantasy enciclopedia for two years... I didn't even pass the page 2 of the novel, lol. Now it's all forgotten.
Or friends who want to "make a game" and their first step is writing game engine from scratch.
I wouldn't be surprised if programmers had, collectively, written more game engines than actual games.
Oh, that's exactly what I do. My rule is: one game, one engine. It's based on whatever the OS provides of course, or an abstraction layer like SDL, but everything above that is my own, tailored specifically to the game at hand.
But how am I supposed to be productive writing blogposts unless I can copy my favorite Clojure templating library into Nix first, so I can have completely statically and reproducible blog posts building from markdown together with the nicest type of templating?
If we're all being honest, I'd rather read the Clojure/Nix templating blogpost instead of the 10,000th "why human interaction is important" bearblog essay.
yeah, part of my current writing push was made more successful by two things:
* I am not allowed to use a blogging system I wrote. (Really, I've written three or four at this point and need to stop, and there are plenty of existing systems that still align with my idiosyncratic constraints.)
* The blog must not have any meta content about blog tooling.
(I cheated a little on the latter by having an extra "site" blog for that - which lets me get the words out but doesn't "count" for the writing goal. A useful outlet, but it meant an extra month or so before "real writing" outnumbered meta writing :-)
But then they have something to write about as their first post.
It's very convenient to have a first project all ready to blog about, fresh in your mind and everything:D
I think writing a static site generator was the first moment I felt like I may be serious about this programming thing.
Those losers who still need Perl on their servers better be ready for a mind explosion
...thought, me back in (too lazy to look up which year it was). I probably published like two things with it, spent (what felt like) a million person hours on it, just to abandon it and use Textpattern.
I think it is great to combine two personal projects into one!
For me, I can't learn anything unless I actually have a purpose for it. So if I wanted to learn how to write a static site system, I would also need to think of a reason I need one!
one of my goals is to work on the server platform that i am using for my websites. i want to write a blog, but i am using that desire to push myself to work on the platform, so i need to complete that blog interface first.
I feel so called out ^_^
*whistles innocently*
That's how most of us started blogging lol
Yeah, I cobbled together an SSG in Guile back in the day.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/974/
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I'd agree, but in this case they were able to write a blog post that got (as of now) 300+ points and 200+ comments with the content of their work.
This is a thing I see everywhere. It’s the carpenter who mostly just builds jigs and french cleats for their workshop. Or the programmer who spends far too much time obsessing over what keyboard and font to use.
“Yak shaving”
It’s a classic move.
Start a new diet, so you join a gym and or buy a bunch of workout stuff.
I won’t knock it though. An important minority of my yak-shaving endeavors have led to long term positive outcomes.
I guess I will setup something similar or more complex. But there are alternatives:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114947
"George R.R. Martin Writes on a DOS-Based Word Processor From the 1980s". No internet, no multi tasking.
I went with paper and pen precisely because there was always more I wanted to do with my computer work flow.
When I need to write something, and I have a computer, and something is inconvenient, I can quickly (well, within minutes, maybe 30 of them) alter it to my liking, and return to writing.
When I only have a pen and paper (which I used extensively for writing at school), many things may be inconvenient, but there's no way to fix it. This may turn into a source of a low-key stress, and interfere with my writing much more than tweaking a computer would.
I use Emacs, an ultimate tweaker's tool, for writing every day. Last time I had to tweak something in it was a few weeks ago, and it took maybe 2-3 minutes. It's a small price to pay for a tool that just does what you need, when you need it, with zero mental load, and zero frustration.
For my two main uses pen and paper has two opposite effects. For creative writing it is freeing because it isn’t the last stop but I don’t have to worry about format or placement or anything. I can just go. Typing has a sort of “technical” feel for me, probably due to code, email, and to some degree comments.
For notes during study pen and paper are constraining and force me to organize the thoughts in my mind first and then commit them. Mistakes needing to be corrected here is good: It reminds me what I misunderstood.
But, like the sibling poster, the writing goes onto the computer for later editing.
What in the world do you need to be able to write with pen and paper?
It’s pretty much the single function of pen and paper.
Pen and paper for writing. Computer for editing.
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.
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
You might want to check out Scrivener (Mac and Windows). I use that in lieu of note cards. The cork board function lets you re-arrange text and media to your hearts content and then compile the final output to Word, PDF whatever. It's designed for non-linear writing.
https://literatureandlatte.com
I hate handwriting with a passion. I have my whole life. I have horrible handwriting and my hand gets sore 5 seconds after I start writing.
I am sure it is because I don't hold my pen/pencil correctly, but I think after 43 years I am not going to suddenly fix that.
Me too. And I can type so much faster and without thinking about it than I can write.
I've had many writing classes in school and different holders for the pen etc but I never managed to improve at all. Writing is just not for everyone.
You sound likely to have dysgraphia, based on the fact I have all the same aspects and a dysgraphia diagnosis.
I am similar. If I physically write a couple times a week, my hand adapts though. It's a skill like any other.
Fountain pens are nice too since you don't need any pressure.
My writing looks a lot better if I just force myself to slow down and be deliberate, but honestly it's a constant battle. I'd definitely benefit from practicing penmanship on it's own.
Worth mentioning - for a long time, I found my handwriting messy AND my hand would tire out. When I was about a teen-ager, I decided to write in call-caps, very clearly. I've been doing that for a long time now, and worth giving a try.
teen-ager? call-caps? Cursive (several hundred years old) fixes this.. all-capitals(caps) or block-caps makes writing more laborious, possibly easier to read (which is why it used to be requested on hand-written forms?)
how did you decide which pens to go with?
Slow down. I’m still deciding on what size of notebook and whether I go dotted or blank.
You want to play some old classic games so you spend five days getting a Raspberry Pi set up just right with Retroarch and then when it's setup just right you do something else.
A good test of your focus on writing is if you can use a boring tool like Substack, Wordpress, Blogger or Github pages (vanilla out of the box ssg setup) and just write.
That said this one did write something. But I'd say for anyone else writr 10000+ words on whatever before a single word on your setup.
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.
> 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?
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.
Structured procrastination [1, 2] was invented full 30 yeas ago, and works very well, given some skill.
[1]: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-procrastinate-and-s...
[2]: https://pennyzenker360.com/how-to-procrastinate-and-still-be...
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.
I love this. Feel like I’m the same way. I also feel like some of this “focusing on the wrong thing” is sharpening the saw, preparing my mind and my environment for greater productivity. As long as I eventually return to the right things.
> Who are we to say what is the right or wrong thing to focus on?
Just observers pointing out that her stated goal was "to write more." If she uses the writerdeck as-is for a couple years, then, she was one of those rare people that discovered an actual single structural obstacle that stood between her and her goal, and then solved it in one fell swoop.
As an ADHD guy, I completely understand the cycle: have a thing you wish you did more, identify some "obstacles" between you and the thing, or just some friction points, and then really enjoy the process of fixing all those things. Then doing the originally desired thing in my perfect new environment and reveling in the fruits of my labor for a glorious day... Or hour. Skyrim modpacks, emacs configs, keyboard setups, OS tweaking, camping gear fiddling, pen and paper gear fiddling.
That's life, it's valid, whatever. I did find though that there's more effective ways to actually do the things I originally stated I want to do, and the more effective ways seem to be a bit more brute force. So for example, trying to quit my reddit addiction, I tried all the little tricks, little apps that track time, browser extensions, host file blocking, etc. The most long term effective strategy though was asking myself, "am I really going to go my whole life without a reddit-free week?" And then escalating that to a month and so on. Basically escalating cold turkey. I wrote about it - https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/how-to-quit-social-media/
Learning mandarin, was what pushed me over the edge of my plateau the fancy apps I kept trying, all the books I was buying, the really slick annotation setup I had on my Boox? Nope, daily simple Anki deck fed by a spreadsheet combined with going to the south more where people don't speak English that much.
To be fair some of my fiddling has resulted in cool outcomes. The handwriting experiments all finally concluded after years of device fiddling onto a specific kokyu notebook size, a specific journal, and a specific set of pens, all of which I own enough to last a while now. My workout tweaking led to a fun form of cardio where I ruck with a lot of weight, a 360 camera sticking out of my bag, and some OSM apps open, letting me ruck around for hours without getting bored while I do OSM contributions. And lo, my emacs tweaking seems to have finally settled down into a config set that for coding hasn't changed for years, though the note taking/ journaling one did get revamped earlier this year so it's not done.
Can you share more about your journal specifics, and Anki deck + spreadsheet? Thanks!
Yeah np, I go into the writing and journaling here https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/in-defense-of-pen-and-paper/
And more detail about the daily reflection activity here: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/my-new-life-stack/#journal
However I'm back on emacs lol, but basically I still do the same flow in emacs that I was doing in trilium. Dotfile: https://github.com/komali2/Configs/blob/master/emacs/.spacem...
Anki I haven't shared online yet, but for writing practice I just grabbed a "top 5k most common characters" deck online, and then reading/listening/speaking, I just chuck words into pleco and then use its build in flashcards system (it can use anki as a backend if you want).
Also re: journaling, I do a handwritten journal + calendar in a Hobonichi, but those don't have enough spare paper for day to day notes and book notes. For that I use kokuyo 80 sheet 8mm ruled w dot lines, soft ring, 148mmx105mm which is basically the exact same size as my Kobo bw, genuinely pocket sized.
For daily todo list it's a mnemosyne... 192? Is that the model name? They're relatively tall but extremely tall pocket notebooks. Basically I'm constantly strapped with hella paper.
What a strangely hostile thing to say to somebody's earnest post about their setup.
I don't think it was meant to be hostile. It is a pattern I always find myself repeating personally. I think they just recognised it as something they do themselves.
If I feel like I have too many things to do, I can end up installing all sorts of todo list apps instead of doing the things. When I feel like a need a nap, I look up optimal nap times, end up reading stuff and then realising I missed the window I could have had a nap in.
I've set up vimwiki and loads of other note taking type apps (or knowledge management apps as they are often called now) and I export my notes from one system into another, and forget to use it.
Flatly: “How dare you lovingly handcraft a bespoke wordworking tool when you could have written a short story instead! We hackers would never spend time improving our circumstances to create more efficient flow states going forward rather than just drearily producing output less efficiently!”
Well if it's strangely hostile I'm sorry but "I need to focus on writing so I spent a few days stripping down a Linux distro" seems pretty disconnected.
I mean it's a fun project!
But it really reminds me of something I would do that isn't entirely positive.
Disconnected from what?
The reason it feels hostile is because you led with a joke about the whole thing being a big mistake, but also that the author wrote about a thing they built to solve a problem they had and ended their post by saying that it worked, and you've popped up to pitch that it might not work.
There isn't any joke in my comment. Apologies for the confusion.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
even worse! you can start a Emacs client evaluate (menu-bar-mode -1) and (tool-bar-mode -1) and put it on full screen
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.
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.
I do think it might be a more recent change related to a)gnome display manager, and b)systemd.
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.
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.
I even added this as an option in my Grub menu.
you missed the fbcon thing
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
My wife bought one of these: https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler
Reviews are wildly polarised. * Some folks find it to be the best thing ever [long battery life, the new patch makes the eink surprisingly fastly responsive, decent keyboard, no distractions] * While others find it terrible [it's still eink, that's a lot of money for a device that doesn't actually do much]
You can find a selection of alternatives, and homebrewed options, here: https://www.writerdeck.org/
Looks great but the price is pretty insane, and really the eink should be a lot bigger. So much wasted space on the bezels.
That looks really cool, but that price point. I could get a Steam Deck + travel keyboard and still come out ahead.
Is that the true price for a low volume, niche product? Eink monopoly continues to make the world worse?
Looked it up, and the original One Laptop per Child came in around $200
I was gifted a Traveler several years ago. It is overpriced and bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality. You can read and write off of it via USB, but it doesn't actually use a true filesystem for your text files, it writes them into the main app's sqlite DB, which in the past has had data loss issues.
My version uses ancient releases of Node and React for the UI for some horrible reason, and it is painfully slow.
I've rooted mine and have it as a project to look at the new OS and decide what to do with it, but if I had the cash I'd look elsewhere.
> bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality.
This is why I don't own a Freewrite. It should be such a simple device, but they found a way to make it complicated and lock it into their proprietary ecosystem. No thanks.
That homebrew page is pure gold. Thank you for the suggestion!
The Pomera line of devices from the Japanese company "King Jim" (yeah, I don't know) are really nice from a features point of view: limited enough to stay out of your way when you're writing, functional enough to enable the basic workflows you'd expect e.g. basic file management, SD card/USB transfers (something that many/most/all Western boutique writing devices like the Freewrite somehow didn't support well or at all last time I checked). Somewhere I have a funky e-ink Pomera thing with a folding keyboard that I did a lot of writing on, and later I bought a DM250, which is not e-ink but works pretty much the same, and now has a US version. I recommend it.
Onyx iterates on its BOOX tablets fairly rapidly, but tends to continuously offer something in various size classifications. You'll find 13.3" tablets typically named as "Max" something or other.
I do see the Note Max as presently available, FWIW: <https://shop.boox.com/products/notemax>
I've had a previous iteration of their 13.3" tablet, the Max Lumi. Slightly lower resolution, and has a frontlight. It is a very nice display, though with an Android OS which I see as a net negative.
I'd really like an e-ink display option for the Framework 12" or 13" laptop.
My dream device is the "Solar A5 e-ink computer" - It's A5-sized laptop, so it fits in a leather zipped case for journals. If you're familiar with HP Journadas / Sony Vaios from early 2000s, that's roughly the form factor. There's a solar panel on the back of the screen / outside of the enclosure. The screen is e-ink, and the operating system is Linux Mint Debian Edition. For console mode, a good "writing station" applications are "mc" (Midnight Commander) and "ranger" - simple GUI for editing text in folders, like a blog/knowledge base.
Some challenges I've experienced: (1) Can't find A5-sized e-ink screens that accept HDMI as an input, (2) It would be cool to use a common Android phone, since there are many around. RaspberryPI is an option. Honestly, would love the simplest portable device that runs Debian Stable on a battery, (3) I have NOT been able to find small, A5-sized keyboards. Most small keyboards are cheap plastic bluetooth junk.
If anyone would like to seriously rally around this, let's talk'bout it. My vision for this laptop has always been "10:00 AM Austin Texas, sitting at a patio bar in direct sun, journalling/coding/writing". I have not been able to find any computer device that satisfies that situation, so there is obviously a market niche.
I use a Bigme Hibreak Pro eink phone, nix-on-droid/ssh to home server over tailscale, and a foldable keyboard, to have my coding setup with me and not be tied to where I can carry a laptop.
For foldable keyboards, if they are flimsy or stable matters.
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/
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?
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.
> The keyboad
Perhaps you should have chosen a better one?!
I chose the keyboard I wanted :)
It was a joke on the typo.
Hahaha I missed that completely, sorry.
...Now I kind of don't want to fix it :D
make the "r" a link to this discussion thread. btw you made the typo twice :-)
If you want something you can use today with a Kindle or other e-reader I made an app for this https://solarwriter.msol.io
If your up for waiting and the usual crowd funding risks there's https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zerowriter/zerowriter-f...
I backed it myself.
Ideally, somebody like Modos would create a replacement e-ink display for the Framework.
[dead]
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.
Nothing opposes a setup like this to collective action. Given that most of modern technology or at least most of the internet is built to actively distract you as much as possible to extract profit, it's just a sane choice to disconnect from this every now and again if you want to work on things that actually matter. And this can totally include things that are for the collective good, and in collective efforts.
It just seems like copium to me. The consolation prize is we get to come up with niche lifestyle preferences to cut out the distractions. We can fine tune our lives to increase productivity. More and more optimization until we're just machines. And then people will use that as a way to feel superior to the sheep who continue to scroll tiktok.
This is a pretty hyperbolic description of someone customizing an old laptop to work the way she wants it to work.
Not really. I only watch movies on my TV, play game on my PS4, and read novels on my Kobo. It’s not about productivity. Having a device tied to an activity is nice for attention and mental load.
You sound defensive.
WTF is this comment suppose to mean? You're telling me a union organizer working to better the material lives of their community is "coping" by distracting themselves from corporate social media?
Some people merely have the urge to create -- For those people, it has little to do with coping. They would like a distraction free environment regardless.
I'm certainly one of those people :)
It's very meditative to solely focus on the one thing in front of you.
I bought an iPod again this year, and started buying MP3s instead of streaming songs.
It's so nice to sit in a chair, close my eyes, and listen to a soundtrack or an old album.
I'm getting old.
There's just more to understand about the music now.
I've enjoyed the in-between of buying music on bandcamp.
Me, seeing someone eating ice cream: “Here is one of several copies of The Permanent Revolution that I keep on my person for this exact situation”
It's not ice cream though. Quite the opposite. It's this notion that puritanical self discipline at the individual level will somehow get us out of this. It won't.
Effective collective action is impossible without both real self discipline and meaningful engagement in life.
Your point has value to the extent that it’s reminding people we can’t just retreat into personal satisfactions.
But to the extent that it pooh poohs self-discipline or joyfully engaged attention, it’s totally wrong. The necessary practice starts with these things and then grows social and organized.
The social and organizing phase is usually less scoldy and pugilistic than some of your commentary here, too.
OP mentioned owning more than one computer in the post. They could spend all of their time watching vtubers stream gacha games when they’re not writing for all we know
That's a total non sequitur.
Seems a little more non sequitur to try to shoehorn “check out this neat thing I did with an old laptop” into the April Theses though
If it’s something like chocolate brownie truffle ice cream, that’s clearly a bourgeois citizen who needs their consciousness raised.
> Only collective action has the potential to do that at this stage.
Nothing resolves the shit storm, but it is absolutely possible to not be in it. Don't need collective action for that.
> Only collective action has the potential to do that at this stage.
Yes in terms of surviving the full shit storm, and yes in terms of deriving security and comfort from community, but the things you mentioned are all valid steps on a path to joining the community of people working together on the issue you're trying to solo cope with.
Example: lately those paying attention here in Taiwan are getting the sense that our internet is fragile, and start looking into solutions for that. Many end up at reticulum and meshtastic. They might fiddle a bit, maybe get a Lora radio or whatever, but regardless, this weekend is g0v summit, where there's a lot of talks and a booth about this exact thing, and yesterday a lot of the people I met attending the talks or visiting the booth are brand new to this. But now they're in the scene, plugged in with people that have been spending years tying solar Lora radios to the top of trees throughout the city.
Getting into offline music, you get to the stage where you start trying to find good quality music, and stumble into the soulseek community, or you start wondering more about modding your dumb secondhand hardware, stumble into the mod community. From either of those into the FOSS/open hardware scene, anti-IP scenes, "four thieves vinegar collective" types.
Basically, there's many paths.
You don't need to solve whats going on around you, just whatever works for you. The fact your chose the word "coping" says more about your mindset than those you're generalizing about.
You sound kinda defensive.
You've used this reply twice now.
Now it's your turn, comrade. Share your effective revolutionary strategy in more detail than "collective action." I've posted about mine here and there on this forum, it's a perfectly valid place for it.
And your copium is posting to HN explaining to everyone how they are Doing It Wrong.
I agree. Collective action can come in two shapes.
One is that enough individuals take action, and the things you list are that, an individual taking action. If enough individuals do it then goal accomplished.
The other is making our politicians force other individuals to do it.
IMO both are necessary. There's some things where decades have proven that individuals are too "weak" to resist the pull of their urges (and nevermind those urges have trillions of dollars of R&D to make them as strong as possible so it's an unfair battle).
> 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.
The victim mindset? What about my initial statement implies that I perceive myself or others as victims? Sounds like projection.
"You sound defensive"
> What about my initial statement implies that I perceive myself or others as victims?
I consider it a good first step.
Of course people reach for individualized solutions first: We (Americans at least) live in a very individualized society.
But these individualized solutions still represent a shift in mindset, of people believing they have agency around how they use technological tools, and of people believing they should make those choices and not a company or the government. This seems very basic and self-evident to anyone who spends time on HN, but it is genuine progress for a lot of people.
Less than 1% of the population is going to do anything remotely close to any of these things. It's just a niche lifestyle preference.
Less than 1% of the population is going to engage in the kind of collective action you want them to.
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
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.)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Consider wordgrinder, a console word processor, as distinct from a text editor. https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder
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.
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...
HN deletes certain words at the beginnings of submitted titles: could we add "It's time to talk about" and potentially also "my"?
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
What we talk about when we talk about…
The unreasonable effectiveness of…
All you need is…
> 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:
and visit http://localhost:8484 on your normal machine.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...
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
Like https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui ?
There is a tons of "modernized" TUI since Rust/Go, and even better terminal and shells.
There is https://www.cliamp.stream/
Great to see Veronica at the top of HN. She's a great creator, highly recommend her content.
(Music creator too, ha ha.)
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
Doogie Howser M.D. vibes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX0_Tuzr4wE
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.
Why not just use DOS? e.g.:
https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos
At least the laptops that can still run DOS natively tend to have fairly good keyboards...
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.
Fonts, wifi
Reminds me of word processing on DOS back in the 80s and early 90s. Pre-WYSIWYG.
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:Wordpe...
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.)
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.
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
Doesn’t tmux support alternate screen. You could run everything in a tmux session and get alternate screen that way.
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)!
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!
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.
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.)
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).
> 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.
If you don't value your time sure. Pen and paper is also basically free and even simpler with no setup time..
"Writerdeck' or simple word processor? They were first sold in the 1960s or 70s. Why? Buy, not build I'm thinking.
The author already had the hardware, better to not buy than to buy.
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.
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.
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.
> valid AF
Nope. We already had a frigging phrase for that, and it’s “completely valid”, not “valid AF” or “cromulent” or whatever. Dumb.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been wondering if I can somehow get the Toshiba Satellite VGA font back to today.
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=Fil...
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://github.com/fcambus/spleen
And yes, it’s quite nice.
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
Anybody else wonder how the screenshots were taken?
I think Veronica setup an identical demo copy in a VM and thus could easily screenshot the VM.
In the associated video, she explains exactly that - a Debian Trixie VM specifically for screenshotting https://youtu.be/E7vFdy4BEAY?si=WVBxmCPLVEdRBbtU&t=114
Is this supposed to replicate the typewriter experience?
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.
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.
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.
Very interesting! But how do you display images?
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...
Just zellij instead of tmux, it's so much better!
How?
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zellij
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.
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!
I think what would really make a nice writerdeck is an E-ink screen. Would be perfect for purely text based interface.
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!
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
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
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.
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!
Awesome machine. Missing Doom though.
https://github.com/wojciech-graj/doom-ascii