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Comment by sandos | Hacker News Reader

It seems to update fast, but with significant ghosting, right? Looking at the cat example. Maybe this is just the best e-ink can do, and thats fine!

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There's a lot better being done by Boox, and even with colour e-ink in terms of ghosting. I think a lot of that is software end, though.

The one unfortunate thing is that this monitor seems to have a glossy screen, not matte, but maybe that's an additional layer over a dev kit?

If this truly is 'open', then it should be trivial to write special X11/Wayland drivers for it, to handle a lot of the ghosting issues at that end. I think Boox actually refreshes portions of screens, and a double or triple video buffer in X/Wayland could do the same.

(One problem with Boox is their relentless phone-home to servers in China, which cannot be disable by normal means.)

Damn shame, because otherwise they look brilliant, I would have wanted one. Thanks for the warning.

Another problem with Boox is the disregard of the requirements of the GPL family of licences. I've been interested in some of their devices but won't touch them due to that (and now due to the issue you stated - though I was unaware there was un-disablable “telemetry”, I'd have to look into that if they ever did something about the lack of GPL compliance).

they didn't, they even said something like "lol we don't care, we will never make things open source".

Can you tell us more about the phoning home?

it's not much different than a samsung device phoning their servers for every thing the device does.

but in this case as it does to china, people are a bit paranoid. usually mostly is their cloud services for notetaking or some push notifications.

but I think I remember people saying they could disable everything by rooting the devices.

boox devices are not even close to 75hz though

not even the latest ones like tab x c

The dev kit works with most if not all eink panels. You are not limited to the panels shipped in this launch.

It is fully open, the full source code, gateware and hardware designs are on github: https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider

The screens included in these kits are glossy, however the board can support pretty much any screen up to 13”, including matte and flexible. On the ghosting - we’ve been thinking a lot about Wayland drivers and other software solutions. We’re working on an SDK that allows a compositor or other software to not just refresh portions of the screen but also change the display mode for certain portions as well.

Thanks! Yes, it does update quickly, and ghosting is still an issue, though I think there’s room for improvement on the OS/software side. I gave a talk at the Linux App Summit earlier this year where I shared some ideas for how this could work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7xTs9-2AgU

I think, if you look at Boox and how they have display options and config for each app, you could do this for X11 quite easily. Especially a custom backend video driver which flattens to greyscale, and distinguishes change on a per app basis.

An incredibly hacky thing, is that (as an example) Sawfish is an immensely extensible window manager. You can literally drop in lisp code linking actions by tagging on window names, application names, and so on.

So you could actually extend sawfish quite easily, and then do what Boox is doing. Change per-window methods of refresh, by interfacing with the backend video driver in X11, and so on.

I think a lot of people who don't use Linux, would "put up" with Linux if there was a way to use a framework with a display. So I think, strongly think, that the display of course and your work of course must be done, but that it relies very strongly on slapping together a more holistic environment.

Just thoughts. And good luck with this.

Thank you for your thoughts and support. I agree, doing this in X11 is definitely doable. I’ve seen others achieve similar results by running a daemon that listens for damage regions. I hadn’t considered using a custom backend video driver; that’s something I’ll be looking into.

My focus has mostly been on Wayland, but possibly prototyping in X11 could be a starting point. Some people I've met are interested in using computer vision techniques at the hardware level, or making a camera rig.

What excites me most is getting this into people’s hands, seeing what they create with it, and working together to improve it and explore new use cases. One use case that I learned about recently:

E-Ink News: The mystery of cuttlefish disguise, scientists use E Ink technology to explore its secrets

https://www.ereaderpro.co.uk/en/blogs/news/e-ink-news-the-my...

Heh, neat use re: tank + fish!

It looks amazing for e-ink. You'd probably don't want this for video anyway, besides it's not even in color. I'm impressed that it works at all. For a lot of work though it could be amazing, depending on your environment.

Say you'd want to pop outside in the nice weather to do some programming. You quickly find why that wasn't as glamorous as you expected. But if you had a laptop with such a screen I would expect it to work great.

What about syntax highlighting?

That indeed would be my issue with it for programming.

I don't require it myself but that's a concern, it's nice to have. Maybe someone can build an editor that uses different fonts within one file instead of different colors. Could be something out there for color blind folks already, though seeing no colors at all is unusual. But e-ink has grayscales so you could at least make comments a bit lighter, I think I'd be happy with that.

There's plenty of options available. A coworker of mine used to print out code for reviews. You can use italic, bold and underline as alternative to colors. Grayscale might work nicely for eInk too - for laser printers just thin/regular/bold probably works better.

Other fonts... I could see myself being distracted by changing fonts in a document, except maybe for comment blocks. But for those italic/thin seems to work well already.

Tried to find the tool... it's GNU enscript. Syntax highlighting for several languages, outputs to postscript.

I like your idea better.

I didn’t know about GNU Enscript, going to check it out. Thanks!

I'd do 3 greys, from lightest to darkest: comments, syntactical cruft like braces, semicolons, certain keywords, etc., and then 'actual' code, variable names and so on.

Much more variation than that with 256 colours is mostly just making it pretty rather than offering helpful distinction imo.

You have the option of a few greyscale levels, bold, pehaps italic, and depending on font maybe extra-bold and light. That should be enough for the essentials, though it will feel like a downgrade if you have got used to a richly colourful environment and rely on it for reasons other than liking it being pretty.

I built a colorscheme for Vim [0] that is close to monochrome when I was worried about blue light (I've since had kids and now this kind of worry doesn't rate at all), and I basically use bold and highlights (I hate underlining, italics, and squiggles, but I think you can do all that too in the GUI version). I found it surprisingly usable.

[0]: https://github.com/camgunz/amber

> in the GUI version

or in the TUI version, in a terminal like Kitty.

I want to try some monochrome UI, but that amber is definitely not my taste. Let me see if there is a "paper-like" theme, or maybe I can make one myself.

I (re)built it w/ a little script I call roygvim [0] -- here's the source [1]

[0]: https://github.com/camgunz/roygvim

[1]: https://pastebin.com/b0LRpjUC

My attempt:

https://images2.imgbox.com/16/79/Tz7rMe2c_o.png

  colorscheme paper
  
  highlight Normal guibg=#f7f5f0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
  
  highlight CursorLine guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE
  highlight CursorColumn guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE
  
  highlight Comment guifg=#777777 gui=italic
  
  highlight Constant       guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight String         guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  highlight Character      guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  highlight Number         guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight Boolean        guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight Float          guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  
  highlight Identifier     guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
  highlight Function       guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  
  highlight Statement      guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  highlight Conditional    guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline
  highlight Repeat         guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  highlight Label          guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  highlight Operator       guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
  highlight Keyword        guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  
  highlight PreProc        guifg=#333333
  highlight Include        guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight Define         guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight Macro          guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight PreCondit      guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  
  highlight Type           guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic
  highlight StorageClass   guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  highlight Structure      guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  highlight Typedef        guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  
  highlight Special        guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  highlight SpecialChar    guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  highlight Tag            guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  highlight Delimiter      guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
  highlight SpecialComment guifg=#777777 gui=italic
  highlight Debug          guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  
  highlight Underlined     guifg=#000000 gui=underline
  highlight Error          guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline
  highlight Todo           guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic
  
  highlight Visual guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
  highlight IncSearch guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE

Thanks for sharing! Would it be alright if I try it out during our livestream this week?

Yes sure. public domain.

Hi Alex. If you are interested in showing VSCode, here are the theme and additional color settings that I use with my Mira Pro:

https://gist.github.com/RossBencina/f37f51c3f53796f0988c7d96...

Possibly not the best syntax highlighting, but generally makes the UI legible.

Feel free to use.

this is not the same technology as e-ink, hence why they call it e-paper

It’s an electrophoretic display, in the category of e-paper, informally called e-ink, made by the company E Ink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Electrophoret...

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