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Comment by wastholm | Hacker News Reader

I bought a Remarkable 2 a month or two ago because I wanted a cool hackable e-ink Linux computer. But instead I immediately started using it as an e-book and document reader and note-taking pad, and nothing else. And, so far at least, that's perfect.

The screen is beautiful (a bit gray, but the black is really black so the contrast is still good), the device is thin and reasonably light, I only have to charge it once a week or so, and there are absolutely no distractions. I have even rediscovered the visceral pleasantness of writing by hand.

I especially like that it's *not* running Android (which I dislike more with each release). The biggest drawbacks, to me, are the fragile pen nibs and the inability to just SCP a PDF or EPUB to the device and have it work (their sync software works but isn't great).

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My first thought was "if you can SSH then you can pipe" and, like magic, you can pipe the wacom device from /dev through SSH to a computer.

The result was this: https://gitlab.com/afandian/pipes-and-paper

Blog post https://blog.afandian.com/2020/10/pipes-and-paper-remarkable...

It's kind of abandonware now, but some others have made some great forks!

https://gitlab.com/afandian/pipes-and-paper/-/forks

https://github.com/flomlo/rm2canvas

This is amazing!

> I have even rediscovered the visceral pleasantness of writing by hand.

A bit unrelated, but I’ve often wondered if I’m in the minority that hates writing by hand. Compared to typing, I’m much slower, and it looks terrible — I print in caps just so that it’s remotely legible.

I avoid handwriting at all costs, and loath the few times it’s required.

I worked in positions that required me to write by hand more than I had in the last decade. I found that my handwriting found an equilibrium that balanced speed and legibility after a while.

Perhaps consider changing your writing technique?

My handwriting is fine but I am slow af compared to editing in a vimlike. Definitely agree with you. None of this writing stuff appeals to me.

The drawing maybe.

When I take notes I usually don't limit myself to writing to lines, I write on the sides, makes arrows, etc... For this "visual note taking" paper (or e-ink tablet) is way better.

I took the LSAT on a lark about 20 years ago, and at the time they required an essay written in cursive. Took me a couple of hours just to reconstruct my distant memories of how to write cursive, and I hated every minute of the essay itself.

Yes, this exact single moment in my life is often recalled any time the subject of handwriting in cursive comes up.

That essay was a complete mess. I was even thinking of that as I wrote my above post. Hilarious that someone else mentioned it.

You're not alone. I appreciate that some people enjoy hand-writing (the act itself, the ergonomics, and all the various bits of physical ephemera that accompany it-- pens, papers, etc) but for me typing's sheer efficiency and inherent machine-readability (not to mention being readable by other humans) wins every time.

This has been a bit of tug-o-war for me for a while. Where I've mostly settled is that I use TiddlyWiki as my main notetaker / knowledge base and using a paper notebook as a sort of sidecar (taking notes by hand where it is easier or more appropriate and then transcribing them into the wiki).

My wiki entries range from little "cards" of a few short sentences to longer entries written while analyzing or designing something.

I long hated writing, and like you only wrote in block capitals, until I decided to re-learn to write cursive. Mostly I wanted to be able to write sweet paper notes to my lovers that didn't look like a 5th grader wrote them. I've found that when the process is approached as art, maybe even meditation, it's far more pleasurable than an act simply meant to record words on paper.

Anytime I write in print, I'm slow and janky but cursive seems to flow out of my hand. By default, it's not very legible except to me but I actually appreciate how it looks and it's easy to focus it when writing to someone else. Cursive definitely flows much easier than print. My only gripe with writing in general is that writing left handed excludes me from about 92% of pens that will streak under my hand.

Being left handed, you've probably found this, but the Zebra Sarasa Dry is what my left handed daughter uses. It's the only cheapish pen that she likes

yes, in cobalt blue, they're perfect. much better than the pilot g2's that preceded them.

Can you share any resources you used to learn and improve your writing? My love letters can always be better.

I worked for about a month a few years back to improve my writing. I just found an example of handwriting I liked and would spend time each morning copying individual characters, then words. Very slowly at first, then it became natural. My handwriting has slipped since then, seems to be something you need to keep working at from time to time.

I've done it twice in my adult life. The first time, I was unhappy with my block capitals, and looked up the letter form references for architectural block lettering, and spend a few hours over a week or so just practicing letter forms. I, in a very literal way, installed a font in meatspace :)

Cursive I think is really more just about getting a feel for the flow of script. There are some technical aspects, like the letter forms themselves, and the rules of joining them -- not all letters in a word can or should be joined, which is obvious to long-time cursive users but was not to me!

But mostly it comes down to knowing the letter forms, and then just using cursive. Write a dear friend a sweet note. Write a couple pages in your diary on occasion. Your forms will become clearer and will flow better with practice. Embellish! Draw huge risers and tails on your letters and pretend you're writing in elvish or something. haha.

The Remarkable 2 drawing app also comes with a calligraphy pen, which does wonders for the readability of many people's cursive.

I wooed my wife with my handwritten letters... Thirty years ago. Of course, these days, I'm also her wife, and my handwriting isn't so good anymore. But my Remarkable 2, after the latest software updates is remarkably good. Now I wish we could reconvene our RPG club from thirty years ago, because it's the best RPG notes device I've ever used, better than paper, because it's more flexible.

I hate my handwriting, but the physical act of longhand absolutely helps me with retention, so I have a reMarkable. It's a pretty great device.

Over the last years, I felt my handwriting was deteriorating. I blamed my lack of practice and reliance on computers, and accepted that.

But, last year I got glasses. With them, my hand writing quickly improved. As an aside, I can type a lot faster on a touch screen now too. Presbyopia snuck up on me somewhere when I hit 40...

I’m terrible at it, but I enjoy fountain pens. They make me slow down enough that it’s at least legible, where my biro-scrawl is very much not. It is hard not to let my brain race ahead though, as it does when I’m typing.

Also fountain pens are shiny and you can get all sorts of inks and accessories!

Yes, I’m in that minority too. I’ve always had poor handwriting and always hated writing by hand.

After introspecting about it, I realized that, for me, it’s because of low grade stress during handwriting, as my attention is constantly churned between thinking about the content and about legibility.

Writing text by hand is certainly slower than typing.

Unless you're filling out a form or writing an essay in school, handwritten things should use more symbolic language. Use a shorthand of words and images and arrows and circles that are meaningful to you. Whether or not someone else (or even you later) can read it is really a secondary concern.

I use handwriting for thinking, not writing. I don’t really expect to be able to recover the things I write down more than 2 weeks after the fact without some extra work.

Have you tried writing with your other hand, if you have it? Writing with my non-dominant hand is slower and more precise. It’s been twenty-odd years of practice, in part in case I lose a hand, and it continues to feel like a fun, healthy challenge.

It might seem obvious but the less you write the more illegible your handwriting seems to you. I noticed this during school. Over summers I would pretty much never have to handwrite anything, and in august I had all the same gripes that you do about my slow illegible terrible looking handwriting. Those kinks would be worked out two weeks into the school year, after your hand is back in shape from writing notes 8+ hours a day.

The other thing about handwriting is that you remember things better. The act of transmuting something you've heard, put it into a thought, then taking that thought and stroking out words on a distinct location on a physical page taps into all these levels of comprehension and processing that you just miss if you take the stenographer approach with a keyboard and transcribe directly what you hear, or even writing digitally on the exact same 8x10 screen day in day out. I've fallen asleep in lectures with my hands on the keyboard mid sentence typing up some note, because the effort required by your brain is so much smaller and you are not nearly as engaged as when you are actually stroking out words and in the background thinking about how to fit relevant information on a unique 8'x11' sheet of paper.

Have you looked at:

https://github.com/Evidlo/remarkable_syncthing

I don't have a remarkable, and have therefore not experimented with this software. But it's the approach I'd prefer if / when I get a device like this.

I have not but it looks interesting so I will. Thanks!

You can actually SCP into the device without any modification. It's under the Copyright section of the device. It'll show you the default SSH password for your device and then you can drop files in there. :)

You can, but getting the reader to pick up a new pdf involves

- Setting up a bit of metadata

- Restarting the system service

it's not quite as simple as `scp file remarkable:/folder`

i don't haven the device but the above sounds like a 10 line shell script to me. slap files in a local directory, execute script, see screen flash on device, items loaded.

That sounds about right in terms of complexity.

Maybe 20, the metadata format is a bit verbose.

Screen more than flashes, it exits to the entry screen, navigation state isn't saved.

For me it's much easier to drop files to reMarkable using RCU [0], works over wifi, too.

[0] http://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

Sure, you can SCP all the files you want but even if they're PDFs or EPUBs they won't show up in the interface. (I can't remember if I actually tried this or if I just read it somewhere. Maybe it's worth a shot.)

Actually you can. The IP address is shown at the bottom of the copyright notice, you can ssh into the device and once your have put your ssh keys onto it, just scp onto it (the ip changes on reboot). Unfortunately, you cannot just copy the documents, but you have to bundle them with some meta data, it is pretty trivial to construct, I made a small script, will try to share it at some time.

you can fix the ip changing on reboot by pegging the MAC to an IP in your router. if you are also running something like pi-hole you can give it a local dns entry too, which makes it even easier to remember.

On my OS at least (ubuntu and probably many others) it can resolve by hostname (after all that is the whole point of having hostnames). So I just do `ssh remarkable` without even having an `.ssh` entry for it.

That can work, if your LAN router's DHCP and DNS are set up to respect the hostname suggested by the client, to update it in the DNS for the LAN domain, and tell DHCP clients to use the router for DNS.

For LAN devices you want to access as a server, I think it's usually easiest and most reliable to just designate a permanent IPv4 address for them with your router's DHCP server, like what OP suggested.

Your SSH client will probably prefer static IP addresses, too, for the record-keeping it probably does about which servers it knows and at what addresses.

I use rMAPI to push and pull stuff from the machine. Not sure if it works for the rm2 as well.

Also, it requires storing your stuff on reMarkable's servers ('cloud').

https://github.com/juruen/rmapi

I love rmapi and use it often with my rM2.

I find rmapi + fzf to be the easiest way to send ebooks in my Calibre library to my rM2.

Its probably possible to create a Calibre addon to do this, but its already makes syncing pretty easy.

> the inability to just SCP a PDF or EPUB to the device and have it work (their sync software works but isn't great).

Are you aware of the web interface? It's only available over USB, and requires flipping a switch in the settings. That interface is so simple that I imagine that an scp replacement is just an novice-level curl invocation away.

Yes, but the "only over USB" thing is unfortunate so I find myself mostly using the bundled cloud service, which is usually something I try to avoid relying on. Some sort of peer-to-peer sync like Syncthing would be great.

When I had a Remarkable, I installed KOReader on it. It transforms the e-book experience from "really poor" to "really power user".

Can you also get kindle on it?

Nova devices are android so kindle, safari reader, and any ePub, pdf etc. book are a breeze to install.

Same here. RM2 is probably one of my best investments for research and learning ever. Only drawback is I cannot read it without light at night. Would have been perfect if there was a back light like kindle.

I was seriously considering popping over to their site and ordering an RM2. But no backlight? That's a show-stopper for me - thanks for mentioning it as I think I just assumed it would have one given that most eReaders do.

Man, I got the thing because I wanted to use it as an ebook and document reader, but it's totally failed at that for me. I spent hours working on a decent system for getting books on the thing and came up empty. I think it would be good for reading and taking notes on academic papers, but I mostly read books, and I couldn't figure out how to get most books on there. A lot of this is Amazon's fault for kindle being a proprietary format, but a lot of it is also the non-Amazon e-book community for failing to provide solutions that are as user friendly as Amazon is.

Edit: But yeah, I love the hardware. It just isn't functional enough for me to use it regularly, which is a bummer.

This is what makes the Android eInk devices better IMO. Yeah, note taking is a touch worse but they are way better at reading as you can just grab the Kindle, Kobo, Google Play Books, Libby, Comixology app etc. And getting things off and on is a breeze because it supports MTP and cloud service apps like Dropbox and OneDrive.

Yeah I was researching the Supernote A5X because of this thread and it has support for kindle books already, so maybe it's a better option for me.

> inability to just SCP a PDF or EPUB to the device

Do they support document delivery through email like Kindle? Recently I showcased[1] 'HN to Kindle' here and someone asked for Remarkable tablet support, But I didn't get an answer regarding email delivery.

Update: A quick search on their website says documents can be emailed out of the device i.e. sharing, But there doesn't seem to be a way to email content to the device.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27483159

Yup. That was my main complaint with it, too. I wrote this package to add email uploads:

https://github.com/remailable/remailable

The rM is a delightful product to hack on.

Thanks for confirming.

So for including support for reMarkable in HN to Kindle, All I need to do is host your project and ask for reMarkable device id from my users?

remailable works by associating their email with a device ID in its own db, so you don't even need to ask users for their device ID as long as you can send emails from a unique email addr. (I can explain more if helpful!)

I also have a public free version hosted at https://remailable.getneutrality.org/ if you prefer not to run one yourself, which you and your users are welcome to use. (it's tricky if you haven't worked with AWS serverless tech previously!)

Thanks again, I'm already using unique email addr just to be safe with Amazon and have prior experience with Lambda.

I'm currently in the process of validating my project and if there's enough need for reMarkable support I'll definitely use your project with due credits + donation(If my project makes any money).

I have been looking at the Remarkable 2 and other devices in the category. My use case is taking notes on CS and maths, which both often require diagrams and other drawings. Can you speak to how well it works for something like this and how it compares to note-taking with a pen and paper?

My experience: iPad with a pencil is much better. But it is a personal choice in the end, I'd say.

I have a ReMarkable 2 as well, and there are zero drawing tools or alike, if you want some graphical object, you just draw it.

You have a multitude of background-guides (lines, grids, etc.) for easier aligning.

The only features you have that you don't get with pen&paper are a layer system and a select tool which you can use for copy/paste/cut or move parts around.

Page management is pretty basic, but ok. You have notebooks which are folders of pages and you can change their order.

Are you able to achieve a split-screen-like functionality, so you can do scratch work while referencing the text?

Unfortunately no. Not even with the 3rd party modifications. Though there are some full GUI linux installs iirc.

It's a common question in the community Discord, and the official patches have been accelerating and implementing a lot of long-asked-for features (e.g. pinch to zoom), but nobody really knows what's on their roadmap. So hard to say if it'll ever get side-by-side.

Hopefully they add open sourcing the whole stack to their roadmap. That'd be the best thing they can do imo. I'm so eager for a device like this that I can 100% get behind.

iPad Pro with Apple Pencil ... and the paper texture screen cover shown here last year.

I use the Remarkable 2 daily. It feels like writing in a notebook - the screen gives you just a little bit of drag like a mechanical pencil and paper would. Very good to use.

Kobo Elipsa appears as a very strong contender.

https://youtu.be/X9UNZqfHEtU

https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1333952722849198084

I guess the problem is that there is no directory to scp into, not that scp doesn't work?

Because if ssh does work - you can always ssh tunnel, and pipe into netcat. A nice trick to impress junior devs BTW :)

Is it good to read PDFs?

Pretty good, and you can make notes & highlight them too

Frankly no, it doesn’t re-flow them so the text will often be too small. Quite a massive oversight and no one really talks about it.

I am surprised anyone would want reflow in their PDFs (that is what epub is for). The PDFs I read would be completely ruined even by minor reflow (e.g. I work with two-column text with many inline figures and math). PDF inherently as a format is not meant to have reflow.

With that context, I love reading PDFs on my remarkable 2. Zooming and panning also works pretty well (given the slow refresh rate of e-ink).

Reflow is offered by Adobe: https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2020/09/23/adobe-unveils-a...

Unfortunately you have to send the file to their servers, which is probably a no-go for many.

The only reason I can think of, is people being unaware of ePub existence.

I agree with you. If you want something that can be reflowed, get the ePub version. Or, if it's meant to be made from images, get the CBZ version.

That's a legitimate criticism, and one reason I've held off buying one. I wonder how long it would take to get a screen size of 13.5" (about the same as US letter paper size, which is what most pdfs are formatted for).

That is legitimately the one thing I wish was different about the RM2 - the screen is 1/3 or so smaller than a regular sheet of paper. If it were 1:1 with a sheet of paper, I would absolutely love this thing.

There is the Sony Digital Paper DPTS1, but it's very expensive.

I see it's been replaced by the Sony DPT-RP1, though that's still expensive. At least this is proof it's possible and creates hope for competitors to emerge.

I have both the Sony and the remarkable and the note taking experience is not comparable. Since I bought the RM2 I've essentially not touched the Sony, the RM2 is so much better. I'd also add that I use the RM2 for reading and annotating pdfs a lot and I had the same thought about size at the beginning. I am a bit more twisted now, I'd definitely like a larger screen when annotating pdfs (just reading is fine actually), but I also think I would leave the device at home much more if it were bigger. The RM2 is a perfect size for always having it with me.

> I wonder how long it would take to get a screen size of 13.5"

Probably quite long. I remember a discussion here on HN a while ago where it was said e-ink displays are expensive since there's no economy of scale and there are only a few manufacturers. Now for larger displays the demand is even lower, so prices tend to be even steeper.

That is really too bad. Hopefully there's either a larger device or upgrade soon, I've been waiting a long time for something like the reMarkable to mature into a product that fits my needs.

Since you can connect via ssh to the device you should be able to use SCP too, shouldn't you?

I personally prefer to mount the cloud via some fuse-based solution though.

Yeah I use rmfuse for connecting. It works like a charm.

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