Comment by codingkoi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codingkoi | Hacker News Reader

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The tools exist with which to do it. People have reverse-engineered the reMarkable enough to start creating Rust libraries to support the hardware[1].

I've been thinking of experimenting with building a Sketchpad-like system on it. With Rust, you have access to LLVM fairly easily, so you could probably do something with JIT compiling code (maybe a Smalltalk dialect) to give whatever you build a programmable interface.

Why Smalltalk? It's simple syntax would be easier to deal with on the reMarkable, and you might be able to look at doing handwriting recognition to let you write the code with the stylus. Could also go with a Lisp, for similar reasons.

All of this is just speculation because I haven't started it for lack of time, but I'm really interested in exploring what's possible in that space. The system specs will probably be constraining (I haven't looked at them recently) but I'm sure they're far far more than what Sketchpad had.

[1]: https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable

I've been eyeing the Remarkable up for some time now. This lib looks pretty cool. Anyone here using this device that could share opinions on its quality and utility?

I use the device (unmodified) very regularly. It's fantastic, highly recommended. The only problem is the price tag.

I came to it from the perspective of wanting a digital notebook that I could also load PDFs on and write margin notes in. I used to keep handwritten notes in notebooks, mostly bullet journal style, and I've completely converted over to using the reMarkable for that.

For that purpose, it is excellent. The software has a few bugs that I've bumped into from time to time, but nothing show stopping. The feel of the stylus on the screen is much closer to pen and paper than anything else I've tried.

It's running Linux and you can shell into it when it's connected to a computer via USB (it appears as a network device on the host), so even if the company collapses, it's very hackable as evidenced by the library I mentioned above.

That said, the price point is a bit high for what it does, and the first thing I always get asked about it is whether it converts my writing to text, which it doesn't.

My wife is in grad school and used to print out papers she needed to read for class so she could write margin notes, and now she just loads the PDFs on her reMarkable and keeps notes there.

The EPUB support was dodgy last time I tried it. The one book I loaded on it would only show one line per page until I adjusted the font size. I generally prefer PDF format anyway, since it's usually laid out better and I'm usually reading technical books on it anyway.

All that said, I highly recommend it, if it's something you think you'd find useful, and aren't put off by the price tag.

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