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Comment by timurlenk | Hacker News Reader

These people have a somewhat modern alternative with mechanical keyboard and eink screen. It has wifi and that's it. From watching the reviews I understood that a major drawback is that no editing is possible on the device itself and it is very expensive (600$)

https://getfreewrite.com/

I personally use occasionally an android based ebook reader with a bluetooth keyboard (Onyx BOOX Poke 2 with logitech k380). Distraction free writing is a thing.

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I picked up a bluetooth keyboard that folds to a size that fits easily in my pocket and paired with my phone that turned out to be a really good writing experience. Writing apps on the phone still default to taking over the full screen and using the phone's "Do Not Disturb" mode was enough to get a good distraction free environment. (On the phone at least, one day in November I was writing in an Irish pub. There was a football game on I was half interested in. A bagpipe band showed up to play a set. The power went out for an hour or so and I was writing under candle light. Plenty of interesting, weird distractions outside of my phone were had.)

This feels like the sort of thing people buy to kid themselves that the problem with their writing lies outside their own brains.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of a dedicated writing device but, for me as someone who writes pretty much for the entire working day, inconvenience is the biggest bar to writing other than lack of sleep. If I can't edit on the device, or find the text in my usual GSuite/Office 365 spaces, then maybe I'd be better off with a $40 dictaphone and Rev.com.

> This feels like the sort of thing people buy to kid themselves that the problem with their writing lies outside their own brains.

I posted elsewhere in this thread about this, so to summarize: I've been at a cabin using LTE tethering, and am consciously turning my Internet connection off and on.

I fully realize that the problem is in my brain, but putting up just that tiny of a barrier is enough of an effective "hack" to change the way I work in a positive way. Because there's no connection most of the time I'm working, there's no HN, there's no email popping up, there's no Slack notifications, and there's no "falling down a rabbit hole searching for a solution". I'm spending way more time writing down/rubber ducking the problem I'm trying to solve and coming up with the solution myself (which generally results in a much better understanding of the problem)

I have an kindle fire keyboard with bluetooth, writing in Jotterpad. I switched to the AlphaSmart NEO2 and it's far superior both in price, time-to-write, and lack of distractions for initial drafts. I chose it after being stalked by relentless $400 FreeWrite ads for months. My wife googled "freewrite alternatives." I have also used apps like "Concentrate" and all the other distraction-free apps.

I have also considered minimal linux distros but realize that it's not going to be much better than my kindle fire.

For editing, I would still use my kindle fire.

I use a custom gulp-based build process from markdown files that I wrote which spits out manuscript format, and the NEO works fine with that. Of course it can only hold 9 scenes at once.

I'm using an old asus transformer with external powerbank because its battery has crapped out. It's one of the worst devices I've ever possessed but still gets the job done.

Now if I only knew where to get antiglare screen protection that actually works. I renewed it recently and the new one is not anti-glare at all. :/

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