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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea for a low-tech, no-distraction solution for writing but man, this AlphaSmart device looks really crap. I hate chiclet keyboards, but I know that not everybody agrees. On the other hand, I can't imagine that anybody finds these 1990's style low-contrast LCD matrix displays pleasant to read. I'd sooner use an actual old-school typewriter.

There appear to be some e-paper solutions but they're expensive.

Honestly I think I'd rather go the George R R Martin route: take an old laptop with decent screen and keyboard then install a barebones environment. It could be as simple as booting straight to a full-screen vim/nano with no distraction installed.

I wish I could do something like that for coding, unfortunately when I program I usually need a browser and internet access to browse docs so I can't remove that. Maybe I should see if I can survive with only elinks or some low-featured web browser.

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This can be done with modern tech. A lot of the time I use a Debian box for my personal stuff with keyboard and cheap 1080p display. It does not run X at all. It's literally just framebuffer console, tmux and terminals. I don't use a web browser on it either.

A neat side effect of this is the machine I use is a fanless N3010 celeron based Lenovo M600 which feels positively lightning quick if you never go near the www on it. Perhaps 90% of the reason a PC feels like a sluggish POS these days is because there's some chunk of browser stack in there somewhere.

Edit: picture of the set up here: https://imgur.com/yjPMYaX

Cheap Chromebooks work well for this, as long as they're among the models that can be jailbroken and take a proper Linux install. Ample power to run a text editor and a textmode browser (Emacs and eww, or any other, lesser, choice you may prefer), but not enough for graphical browsing and other distractions. Too, since they're specced to run Chrome for a couple hours, you can easily get 8 to 10 hours of battery life running something less absurd.

The keyboards aren't what you call great, but they serve well enough. I like a mechanical keyboard as much as the next dork, but I've never really felt the lack when using the Chromebook for writing.

> Cheap Chromebooks work well for this, as long as they're among the models that can be jailbroken and take a proper Linux install.

Jailbreaking Chromebooks is a huge hassle, though. Much easier to install Linux on a standard box from the past 10 to 15 years. You can also buy cheap low-end hardware with Chromebooks-like specs that will run Linux out of the box.

That's literally my setup in slackware, but you can watch movies in framebuffer, and I surf too (lynx/links/sacc).

        #!/bin/sh
        clear
        setterm -cursor off
        echo -en "\e]P0000000"
        mplayer -really-quiet -vo fbdev2 -vf scale=1280:-2 -cache 2048 "$@"  
        setterm -cursor on
        echo -en "\e]P01d2229"
        clear

Games?

- IF. Lots of them.

- Slashem.

- MUDs.

- Mednafen through framebuffer. Even gamepads work.

Also, if you get used to edbrowse, you can even use some JS ridden sites. Youtube? mpsyt + youtube-dl. Telegram? Bitlbee+IRSSI.

But when you use gopher (gopher://magical.fish and gopher://floodgap.org as a start) everything is instantaneous.

Oh, and, for music the Soma cli tool from slackware. Amazing.

Completely. I’ve actually written a mostly working terminal gopher client in Go which is reminiscent of such browsers :)

Source: https://pastebin.com/B7KqsDRg (no dependencies, no license)

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/vNLO2zJ

Ah, I know it, I tried it long ago, but I prefer sacc.

Not sure about the older Alphasmarts, but the Neos have pretty standard laptop keys. The display contrast isn't great, but it's not terrible like the late 80s/early 90s graphic LCDs. The small footprint compared to a current laptop is nice.

I'm also building something like what you are thinking about with an old intel NUC mounted on an even older LCD monitor and running Xmonad. It's a surprisingly fun project. My notes on the build are here: https://hackaday.io/project/174680-distraction-free-linux-ba...

Disclaimer that may invalidate the rest of my post: I tend to prefer scizzor-switch keyboards. For example, I adore the Apple Keyboards that shipped with iMacs up until ~2016, although I strongly dislike their newer “Magic Keyboard” (never mind the Butterfly Keyboard) which IMO has too little travel.

But now that you know my biases, let me say that I think the Alpasmart has a damn good keyboard! The keys are large, have more travel than most modern laptops, and feel quite satisfying to press. If you’re used to a mechanical keyboard and really set on that experience, you may be disappointed, but there’s still a lot to like.

I too thought the key travel was fine with my AlphaSmart 3000, but found them too loud when typing in a conference room. That 500 (no typo) hour battery life with 3 AA batteries though. Brilliant device.

This is why Sir Clive Sinclair's second computer company invented the Z88:

https://oldcomputers.net/cambridge-z88.html

https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=279

https://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/z88/

I have one, and it's a lovely machine. An 8-bit but it can take a meg or so of RAM and a few megs of storage. Unfortunately, on unique, proprietary memory cards.

I would adore a modern version, say running text-only Linux on a RasPi Zero W. No hinge, letterbox mono screen, and a couple of CF or full-size SD slots...

The Alphasmart Neo keyboard has a decent tactile feel for a membrane keyboard.

The LCD displays aren't great on the eyes but they are OK, and they have the benefit of excellent battery life using just standard AAs and much lower latency compared to e-paper.

Is that an actual LCD matrix display? One would think that a small-form-factor e-paper display (the format that's sometimes used for shelf labels and the like) could replace monochrome LCD pretty much everywhere these days.

I always get this terminology confused. My Pebble 2 supposedly has an “e-paper” display, but based on looks I’m pretty sure it’s the same type of screen as what’s in my graphing calculator and my AlphaSmart Dana, although the latter two definitely have less contrast than the Pebble, I assume because they’re older and/or of lower quality.

The pebble 2 is e-paper. The underlying tech is quite different from lcd.

Are you sure? I know Pebble always referred to it as "e-paper", but I recall seeing a lot of people say it's actually a type of LCD screen.

From a quick Google: https://hackaday.com/2014/02/16/fixing-the-unfixable-pebble-...

> The actual screen used in the Pebble is a Sharp Memory LCD.

It's definitely not e-ink btw, which I know is indeed different. It doesn't look anything like e-ink.

My apologies - I stand corrected. I was pretty certain they actually used e-ink, but it is low power LCD.

Two things:

The latency of e-paper doesn't provide a great typing experience.

"These days" isn't really applicable - the Alphasmart devices haven't been made since 2013.

They feel really great; very similar to a PowerBook keyboard of the era. There's a different model (AlphaSmart Dana) that runs Palm OS 4 if that type of display is more your thing.

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