Hacking on the ReMarkable 2 | Hacker News Reader

Hacking on the ReMarkable 2

sgt.hootr.club

77 pointstodsacerdoti31 comments

I bought a ReMarkable 2 a couple of years ago with far higher hopes of hackability than it ultimately ended up supporting. Ended up selling it a few months ago after it just couldn't fit into any of my usecases.

I think ReMarkable is wasting a TON of potential at their price/form factor/ux. A device can be powerful without sacrificing simplicity and singularity of purpose.

It's selling point is a lack of features. There's no web browser, no Instagram, no Facebook or Slack. No messaging. Just a digital piece of paper. No distractions. If you give me a way to get reddit on there, the device is ruined.

It's BS.

It doesn't support non-Latin languages, not even having a keyboard for them. Its handwriting recognition barely works, and it lacks a good system to organize notes.

The hardware is awesome, but their software is terrible.

That's a clear case of PEBTSAC [1] as it is not the device which decides whether those mentioned time wasters are able to do their master's bidding but the person using the device. Sellers of 'premium' devices which are specced-down so as not to be able to run those things are guilty of the same crime as sellers of 'light' products which replace nutritious ingredients with water or air while selling at a 'premium' price. Just eat less of the good stuff instead of being suckered into paying more for less. The same goes for these 'premium´ devices which only do one thing and often do that thing badly.

[1] s/Keyboard/Touch Screen/

> same crime as sellers of 'light' products which replace nutritious ingredients with water or air

The analogy, in this case, would be replacing NON-nutritious ingredients with water or air.

That wasn't its selling point for me. I installed KOReader on mine and have been quite happy with the result, but expect to move to a PineNote in the near future, as I'm tired of jumping through someone else's hoops to control my own hardware.

I didn't want a web browser either. I wanted access to my calendar, or some way to set the lockscreen to my calendar. I wanted a live syncing folder of images/pdfs that wasn't tied to the subscription remarkable walled garden. I wanted a way to read rss content, instead of setting up a complex automation to sync things over ssh.

I have been rocking a Daylight computer for about a year now. It is my primary mobile device, and I am writing this very comment from it. I highly recommend it.

That's not an e-ink device though, right?

I was trying to find an e-ink tablet, amazon kept recommending me the magic notepad from xppen. It looked good, but I wasn't sure what that cryptic "x-paper display" was. The wording is just vague enough to make you think it's an e-paper display, without committing to that detail.

It took going through comments to find out that it's not an e-ink display.

The Daylight computer seem like that too. So what do you think of the display? Is it just another LED screen, or does it approach e-ink in any way?

I really hated how they marketed that tablet. Some weird statements about how it will transform your life, all while making meaningless comparisons about framerate by just not acknowledging the difference between e-ink and transflective LCDs (to the point I found it intentionally misleading).

Might still be a good product though, of course.

Have you seen these? https://usetrmnl.com/developers

I was thinking about picking one up and giving it a shot.

cheers, im on the TRMNL team.

looks like reMarkable runs linux so in theory our OSS lib would do the trick: https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-display

which can then point to one of several OSS server clients we offer: https://docs.usetrmnl.com/go/diy/byos#implementations

I did end up buying one! I really love it, and though I haven't hacked much on it, I really haven't needed to. If it's something you're interested in, you won't be disappointed.

I've had a reMarkable 2 since 2020 or so. To be honest, the only area of the device I have ever wanted to be hackable was the sync API. I am completely satisfied with the gestures, e-reader and pretty much everything else. But what I'd love to be able to do is to access my files, stored in the cloud, automatically. My use case in particular would be something that passively converts my scribbled annotations into other things.

The API hacking scene is very much dead. Most API implementations have been unmaintained for years now and no longer work. It's a real shame.

Indeed, what sucks the most is to almost not being able to sync it conveniently in local without having to use "their" cloud.

If remarkable's writing experience appeals to you, but you don't want to lock yourself in their walled garden, check out Supernote. They have a much easier file transfer, sync with calendars, and most importantly no subscription. You still have to do some hacking to download certain apps, but overall they are much more tinkering-friendly. Writing feels a bit different, but not in a bad way — it's just a matter of personal preference (I personally like both). There are plenty of reviews online explaining the difference if that's important to you.

I owned a Remarkable 2 and sold it when the Remarkable Paper Pro came out. I now own a Remarkable Paper Pro and a Remarkable Paper Pro Move. I use them for deep work and it really helps me with distractions. I leave the Paper Pro at home and I carry the Paper Pro Move as part of my every day carry.

The one feature I miss is being able to have a split screen so that I could have a document open and be writing in another document. Something like note taking from a book. To overcome this now I have documents open on my laptop to reference as I am writing on the Remarkable.

I would be so into the ReMarkable if it has an "app store", if I could write an RSS client.

They don't have an app store but they have quietly released an SDK, so maybe that will happen at some point: https://developer.remarkable.com/documentation/sdk

RSS is actually one of my favourite uses for the tablet; I built a little service that builds a pdf "newspaper" twice daily and sends it to Google Drive. Very nice to read my feeds on the rM2 instead of a glowing screen

An RSS client without a web browser, which the team is fervently opposed to?

I remember having run netsurf from toltec.

Netsurf isn't fun on many websites but it should be enough for rendering HTML content from RSS, no? Terminal emulators and lynx/elinks/links/w3c work, too. And terminal RSS readers. HTML rendering is also possible with KOreader which runs well on rM2, come to think about it.

Here is the repo for netsurf https://github.com/alex0809/netsurf-reMarkable

…yes? I like RSS clients because they're not web browsers.

There is one: https://github.com/toltec-dev/toltec/

Its development kinda stalled, with several PRs stuck at 90% completion.

I'm using reMarkable 2 as an e-book reader, using KoReader. It's almost perfect for me, the only thing that I'm missing is Bluetooth. And its WiFi is sometimes a bit flakey.

We do. The Toltec repos have tons of packages, including the Entware repos, which is what (used to) back OpenWRT devices.

There's also a UI frontend for the package manager in beta.

Thank you very much for this writeup!

I've had my rM2 since 2020 and enjoyed the hacking community a lot. I've since lost track - at some point I updated the firmware because I wanted the automatic shapes feature from upstream and couldn't use the framebuffer anymore.

You've summed up a lot of findings that I've made again and again trying to pick up where I left but it's become very confusing.

Looking forward to your next update! No pressure, though :)

I've just remembered: Check out KOreader if you haven't. I think it doesn't rely on QT and it runs on rM2 tablets with recent firmware if you launch it via ssh after stopping xochitl.

Glad you enjoyed it :)

I have taken a (short) look at KOReader and saw that there's an instructions page on its wiki on how to install it on the rM2; it still uses rm2fb but it suggests using timower's version, which works on newer versions of the OS. What I should've made more clear in the post was that there are options, they're just less convenient to use because Toltec doesn't work.

I started on a RM2 and upgraded to a Pro when it came out.

I knew going in that it was not going to live up to the hype of the marketing around changing your life. But it has proven to be a very useful addition to work where the screen sharing enables me to have a shared whiteboard remotely that I can actually scribble on. The reading experience is also good with a decent sized screen. Being able to annotate books without feeling like you are desecrating a real book is a game changer.

To anyone from the Remarkable team is reading this: for a device priced at a premium, there sure are lots of corners that feel like they were cut.

1. Would it really have killed you to put a faster SoC on the device? Pressing the wake button to the screen responding can sometimes be 5 seconds. Opening a large PDF can take upwards of 30 seconds.

2. The backlight controls seem to be detached from real life use. The maximum setting produces enough light to be readable in a semi-low light environment(think dusk), but even one notch lower than that is useless. What is the point of having 5 levels of brightness if I only ever get to use 5 or 0

3. I would love to have palette controls. The display supports lots of color but all my writing tools only support 6 preset colors. There is a nice use case of them around paper games like variant Sudoku that require using color to keep track of the solve and having only a small preset color range is very limiting.

This laundry list only exists because the potential of this device is high. If none of these issues are fixed but they release a RMPro 2 with better battery like, I’d still buy it.

Remarkable means subscription. And I *DO NOT* want that. If this could support self hosted stuff like Nextcloud or something? Or a simple shared folder?

RSS or Pocket client?

But no, nothing, just the subscription stuff. So it's a no from me.

Account and subscription are not strictly necessary for local usage. And there is https://github.com/ddvk/rmfakecloud that allows to sync files without account.

reMarkable still work really hard to force you into a subscription - or at least into using their very bad, non-zero knowledge cloud service. ... I don't know why but it is not obvious why this would be for the benefit of the user.

I own a reMarkable 2, but I fill it via RCU [1]. I will absolutely not buy into yet another opaque cloud offering in 2025.

edit: The project you linked looks interesting, though!

[1] https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

You have root SSH out of the box. You can run any kind of sync you want. The Toltec repos have syncthing and half a dozen others.

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