Not too bad it turns out. You still have bold, italic, underline and gray. You can do an inverse text, which is good for headers (e.g. magit sections). I guess with a GUI editor, you can do things like boxes around tokens etc. -- I'm in an emacs over ssh most of the time, so I haven't looked into that.
I actually ended up liking this and have been using it since then, on a LED display.
That said, working on an e-ink device and doing mostly lightweight scripting occasionally, it's not a showstopper, and greyscale highlighting (which I've not looked into yet) could well work out.
I do remember when monochrome ANSI sequences were all I had on early serial terminals: regular, bold, underline, and reverse video. That's at least four gradations, and with a few greyscale shades, the palette should be usefully broad.
It works nicely for books. Can't see why it wouldn't work for screens.
Otherwise, yes, quite.
Now all this was for monospaced terminal and Vim use. I’d very much like to try it with the ability to use a proportional typeface, and especially in the context of a monospace environment, to experiment with mixing different faces (Triplicate + Equity).
Back to the monochrome thing: I’d like to be able to use grey in most or all of the places where I currently use colour, simply to distinguish them more clearly; it’d be a lighter grey than the luminosity channel of the corresponding colours. Give me that, and monochrome is quite sufficient. But really, even black-and-white was tolerable, though it’d lend significant difficulty for some features line diff highlighting. Certainly full colour is nowhere near as necessary as most imagine (commonly often never having experienced anything else).
That said, I also think that an eink screen (or tablet with screen) that you can use with any laptop has a much larger audience than having it built in.
I'm not sure how many tones this eink screen has, but there certainly is a variety of monochrome editor themes. You could make your own if not.
Here is a demo of the Pixel Qi10 display : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi6DbFyZde8
They had a dual mode so you could have the look/feel of a normal backlight LCD panel but when you wanted to go outside you could toggle to transflective mode.
This means you would have normal refresh rates, color, multimedia, and an actual useful display when outdoors.
Not sure why they ever went bust or what happened to the IP for these displays.
Refresh rates on e-ink are more than sufficient for text, and suffice for getting a general sense of video, though I wouldn't call that a high-level experience.
Scrolling and similar are a bit rough, though the general solution is to avoid doing that, and instead navigate through pagination --- a full page (or portion) at a time.
Hard disagree but I understand this is personal and that perceived experience will vary across the board.
I agree that e-ink is great for _reading_ text which is why it is used in e-readers.
I'll say again that on the device I have, I can quite reasonably get a sense of a video.
Video of BOOX playing video: https://yewtu.be.com/watch?v=XRDJv_-wWBI (Videoception!) Yes, it's B&W, yes, the framerate is low (about 4--8 fps AFAICT), and yes, there's some ghosting. But it's clear what the content is. Not appreciably worth from an old B&W television in the day --- better resolution for lower framerate, perhaps, on e-ink.
If I'm writing text, it's almost always within vim or a similar text editor, and my navigation is either paging forward or back through the document (full-screen repaints), or using search. Again, that is well-suited to e-ink.