Time to talk about my writerdeck
veronicaexplains.net
veronicaexplains.net
That said, I do think there's a bit of irony to solving your "paying attention to writing" problem by setting up your OS from scratch, choosing to swap out the default networking stack, installing a novel flavor of your preferred text editor because you're "trying to get to know it a bit more," customizing your battery readouts, tweaking the login sequence, and then, after all that effort to make sure you'd have the perfect environment for uninterrupted writing sessions, installing tmux so that you'll be able to do multiple things at a time.
Go Tim Ferris way - notebook where the first page is left for the table of contents, and number all even-numbered pages as first step.
Scrivener just matched my workflow - usually for technical reports. Lot of cut/paste from a variety of sources.
But how do you archive these cards? That always drove me mad so I use them only for something “encyclopaedical” otherwise it is too much messy.
It's mainly the capturing of the ideas that I prefer writing physically. After that, being able to move them around my digital system makes them most useful because I can have dynamic views that surface priorities and related notes without having to physically sift through the stacks.
I am sure it is because I don't hold my pen/pencil correctly, but I think after 43 years I am not going to suddenly fix that.
Fountain pens are nice too since you don't need any pressure.
My writing looks a lot better if I just force myself to slow down and be deliberate, but honestly it's a constant battle. I'd definitely benefit from practicing penmanship on it's own.
Several thousand more like.
I've had many writing classes in school and different holders for the pen etc but I never managed to improve at all. Writing is just not for everyone.
Use a fountain pen. You can't press too hard: it bends and breaks the nib.
Disposable ones are good enough now, e.g. the Pilot V-Pen.
https://cultpens.com/products/pilot-vpen-v4-disposable-fount...
When I only have a pen and paper (which I used extensively for writing at school), many things may be inconvenient, but there's no way to fix it. This may turn into a source of a low-key stress, and interfere with my writing much more than tweaking a computer would.
I use Emacs, an ultimate tweaker's tool, for writing every day. Last time I had to tweak something in it was a few weeks ago, and it took maybe 2-3 minutes. It's a small price to pay for a tool that just does what you need, when you need it, with zero mental load, and zero frustration.
For notes during study pen and paper are constraining and force me to organize the thoughts in my mind first and then commit them. Mistakes needing to be corrected here is good: It reminds me what I misunderstood.
But, like the sibling poster, the writing goes onto the computer for later editing.
It’s pretty much the single function of pen and paper.
For me, I can't learn anything unless I actually have a purpose for it. So if I wanted to learn how to write a static site system, I would also need to think of a reason I need one!
* I am not allowed to use a blogging system I wrote. (Really, I've written three or four at this point and need to stop, and there are plenty of existing systems that still align with my idiosyncratic constraints.)
* The blog must not have any meta content about blog tooling.
(I cheated a little on the latter by having an extra "site" blog for that - which lets me get the words out but doesn't "count" for the writing goal. A useful outlet, but it meant an extra month or so before "real writing" outnumbered meta writing :-)
I wouldn't be surprised if programmers had, collectively, written more game engines than actual games.
Tailored to web developers, there definitively are more half-finished frameworks sitting on people's disks than finished web applications, I'm sure my ratio is pretty close to 1/1 over the years.
Those losers who still need Perl on their servers better be ready for a mind explosion
...thought, me back in (too lazy to look up which year it was). I probably published like two things with it, spent (what felt like) a million person hours on it, just to abandon it and use Textpattern.
(I admit, I am guilty).
But I am also currently writing version 2 of an app that utilizes a general-purpose application server that I wrote (took about seven months), at first. It's been shipping for a couple of years. The server does great, but is unwieldy. I suggest against writing general-purpose servers.
The new version uses a newer, more focused, server that is a lot lighter.
It’s a classic move.
Start a new diet, so you join a gym and or buy a bunch of workout stuff.
I won’t knock it though. An important minority of my yak-shaving endeavors have led to long term positive outcomes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114947
"George R.R. Martin Writes on a DOS-Based Word Processor From the 1980s". No internet, no multi tasking.
That said this one did write something. But I'd say for anyone else writr 10000+ words on whatever before a single word on your setup.
Is your "writing job" one where the end goal is like short random articles on some giant aggregate, or something like instructional content for businesses or something? Where a human typing things was just a means to an end, rather than what I'd assume OP's doing where they're writing for their own joy and/or because people love their specific voice? Because that's the only way my brain can rationalize it right now.
How do you think the ownership of these passages? Created by yourself or both of you? In what degree you would consider the line between you and her efforts?
"To solve this problem, I engineered an entire system from scratch."
Response: "That's a cool solution. But, isn't it a lot more work than this straightforward solution?" (the user is right - the complicated solution is massively more work than the straightforward one)
Response: "Yes, but it's a cool project - it's OK to not be the most efficient all the time." (also right - there's nothing wrong with doing projects with zero utility just for the fun of it, and this one actually does have some use)
It seems like there's a bifurcation of expectations.
Some people want to do a project, and they take a thin justification as an excuse to do so.
Other people really do want to solve a problem, but they get mired in perfectionism and overengineering, or aren't even aware of the simpler solution.
Conflation between these two categories keeps many HN threads gainfully employed.
(worth noting that for people in the latter category, pointing out "there's this simpler solution" can be incredibly helpful, because they simply might not know that it exists, or maybe they need a little bit of pushing to realize that they're overengineering things and that they got stuck in a place that they don't actually want to be in. this has been me, many many times)
is it ? it's a non-negligible reason for the absolutely unsufferable technological world we are currently living in
I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “OK, I’ll send you the pages.”
Then I’m going down the steps, and my wife calls up, “Where are you going?” I say, “Well, I’m going to go buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in a closet.” And I say, “Hush.” So I go down the steps here, and I go out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of 47th Street and 2nd Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.
I guess if this writerdeck works persistently for many projects then fine. But if every 2 projects the writerdeck gets revamped then it seems like a way to get a dopamine hit or distract ones self. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't seem like it's a net benefit in terms of focus.
Entirely depends on what the author wanted to focus on. Who are we to say what is the right or wrong thing to focus on?
For example, I often don’t pay my bills (the money isn’t the issue). I have to have sufficient debts that they become convincing boogeymen. Work can’t feel like escape if there’s nothing to escape from.
[1]: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-procrastinate-and-s...
[2]: https://pennyzenker360.com/how-to-procrastinate-and-still-be...
Just observers pointing out that her stated goal was "to write more." If she uses the writerdeck as-is for a couple years, then, she was one of those rare people that discovered an actual single structural obstacle that stood between her and her goal, and then solved it in one fell swoop.
As an ADHD guy, I completely understand the cycle: have a thing you wish you did more, identify some "obstacles" between you and the thing, or just some friction points, and then really enjoy the process of fixing all those things. Then doing the originally desired thing in my perfect new environment and reveling in the fruits of my labor for a glorious day... Or hour. Skyrim modpacks, emacs configs, keyboard setups, OS tweaking, camping gear fiddling, pen and paper gear fiddling.
That's life, it's valid, whatever. I did find though that there's more effective ways to actually do the things I originally stated I want to do, and the more effective ways seem to be a bit more brute force. So for example, trying to quit my reddit addiction, I tried all the little tricks, little apps that track time, browser extensions, host file blocking, etc. The most long term effective strategy though was asking myself, "am I really going to go my whole life without a reddit-free week?" And then escalating that to a month and so on. Basically escalating cold turkey. I wrote about it - https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/how-to-quit-social-media/
Learning mandarin, was what pushed me over the edge of my plateau the fancy apps I kept trying, all the books I was buying, the really slick annotation setup I had on my Boox? Nope, daily simple Anki deck fed by a spreadsheet combined with going to the south more where people don't speak English that much.
To be fair some of my fiddling has resulted in cool outcomes. The handwriting experiments all finally concluded after years of device fiddling onto a specific kokyu notebook size, a specific journal, and a specific set of pens, all of which I own enough to last a while now. My workout tweaking led to a fun form of cardio where I ruck with a lot of weight, a 360 camera sticking out of my bag, and some OSM apps open, letting me ruck around for hours without getting bored while I do OSM contributions. And lo, my emacs tweaking seems to have finally settled down into a config set that for coding hasn't changed for years, though the note taking/ journaling one did get revamped earlier this year so it's not done.
And more detail about the daily reflection activity here: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/my-new-life-stack/#journal
However I'm back on emacs lol, but basically I still do the same flow in emacs that I was doing in trilium. Dotfile: https://github.com/komali2/Configs/blob/master/emacs/.spacem...
Anki I haven't shared online yet, but for writing practice I just grabbed a "top 5k most common characters" deck online, and then reading/listening/speaking, I just chuck words into pleco and then use its build in flashcards system (it can use anki as a backend if you want).
Also re: journaling, I do a handwritten journal + calendar in a Hobonichi, but those don't have enough spare paper for day to day notes and book notes. For that I use kokuyo 80 sheet 8mm ruled w dot lines, soft ring, 148mmx105mm which is basically the exact same size as my Kobo bw, genuinely pocket sized.
For daily todo list it's a mnemosyne... 192? Is that the model name? They're relatively tall but extremely tall pocket notebooks. Basically I'm constantly strapped with hella paper.
> This reads like someone with ADHD took Adderall and accidentally focused hard for a day on the wrong thing. It has happened to me.
It is very far away from being a joke.
I mean it's a fun project!
But it really reminds me of something I would do that isn't entirely positive.
The reason it feels hostile is because you led with a joke about the whole thing being a big mistake, but also that the author wrote about a thing they built to solve a problem they had and ended their post by saying that it worked, and you've popped up to pitch that it might not work.
If I feel like I have too many things to do, I can end up installing all sorts of todo list apps instead of doing the things. When I feel like a need a nap, I look up optimal nap times, end up reading stuff and then realising I missed the window I could have had a nap in.
I've set up vimwiki and loads of other note taking type apps (or knowledge management apps as they are often called now) and I export my notes from one system into another, and forget to use it.
I disagree 100%. Collective action isn't ever going to persuade Apple or Google to correct course. Collective action has already failed to compel Microsoft for 30+ years. These companies picked their side and your bargaining has zero leverage if you continue to purchase their products and suffer their indignation.
You can only improve your life by getting rid of disrespectful advertising and low-quality slopware. The victim mindset is a lazy lie, one that you tell yourself to justify a net negative lifestyle.
>> The way people are coping
>> the intractable shitstorm happening right now.
>> a drop in the ocean in terms of making your life better.Of course people reach for individualized solutions first: We (Americans at least) live in a very individualized society.
But these individualized solutions still represent a shift in mindset, of people believing they have agency around how they use technological tools, and of people believing they should make those choices and not a company or the government. This seems very basic and self-evident to anyone who spends time on HN, but it is genuine progress for a lot of people.
Your point has value to the extent that it’s reminding people we can’t just retreat into personal satisfactions.
But to the extent that it pooh poohs self-discipline or joyfully engaged attention, it’s totally wrong. The necessary practice starts with these things and then grows social and organized.
The social and organizing phase is usually less scoldy and pugilistic than some of your commentary here, too.
One is that enough individuals take action, and the things you list are that, an individual taking action. If enough individuals do it then goal accomplished.
The other is making our politicians force other individuals to do it.
IMO both are necessary. There's some things where decades have proven that individuals are too "weak" to resist the pull of their urges (and nevermind those urges have trillions of dollars of R&D to make them as strong as possible so it's an unfair battle).
I'm certainly one of those people :)
It's very meditative to solely focus on the one thing in front of you.
It's so nice to sit in a chair, close my eyes, and listen to a soundtrack or an old album.
I'm getting old.
I've enjoyed the in-between of buying music on bandcamp.
Yes in terms of surviving the full shit storm, and yes in terms of deriving security and comfort from community, but the things you mentioned are all valid steps on a path to joining the community of people working together on the issue you're trying to solo cope with.
Example: lately those paying attention here in Taiwan are getting the sense that our internet is fragile, and start looking into solutions for that. Many end up at reticulum and meshtastic. They might fiddle a bit, maybe get a Lora radio or whatever, but regardless, this weekend is g0v summit, where there's a lot of talks and a booth about this exact thing, and yesterday a lot of the people I met attending the talks or visiting the booth are brand new to this. But now they're in the scene, plugged in with people that have been spending years tying solar Lora radios to the top of trees throughout the city.
Getting into offline music, you get to the stage where you start trying to find good quality music, and stumble into the soulseek community, or you start wondering more about modding your dumb secondhand hardware, stumble into the mod community. From either of those into the FOSS/open hardware scene, anti-IP scenes, "four thieves vinegar collective" types.
Basically, there's many paths.
Nothing resolves the shit storm, but it is absolutely possible to not be in it. Don't need collective action for that.
A lot of the complaining in the comments that “this doesnt solve anything for the masses” or “its too complex for the problem space” are totally missing the point. It’s not about you or the greater society. Greater society has chosen the slippery slope race to the bottom and can’t be saved because they can’t be bothered with taking on a little extra complexity or doing things to help themselves.
Non-hotswappable life improvements/tech that don’t make life faster/more efficient?! Oh the humanity!
A collective action will only improve things for the least common denominator of the collective…which isn’t that helpful to the individual who is already unable to change things for the collective. It was the collective that helped create the shitstorm why work with them?
I used to use this a lot when trying for a less distracting desktop, just like in the original post.
As an aside: on some of my computers it is Ctrl+Alt+F2 but on others it is Ctrl+Alt+F7 to return to graphical mode.
FWIW, right now I'm typing this from Ubuntu Studio 24.04 and it's Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get back to the GUI. Ctrl+Alt+F1 shows you the bootup output scroll, +F3 to +F6 will give you a login prompt to drop into a shell. +F7 to +F12 just give me a blinking cursor un the upper right corner of the display.
I'm kinda surprised only +F3 to +F6 give me a shell login. Three isn't that many.
I've got a great writing setup on Obsidian that really works for me, a royal kludge mechanical keyboard...just waiting on the next gen of eink
The Boox One Note Max was sooo close, but they almost immediately discontinued the product and probably won't be supporting it long.
Suggestions are welcome
One of the appealing features on the Note Max was the screen size (13.3"). How do you find working on such a small screen?
Perhaps you should have chosen a better one?!
...Now I kind of don't want to fix it :D
I fixed the second one normally because that's just embarrassing. I guess at least we know it was really written by a human? ;)
Reviews are wildly polarised. * Some folks find it to be the best thing ever [long battery life, the new patch makes the eink surprisingly fastly responsive, decent keyboard, no distractions] * While others find it terrible [it's still eink, that's a lot of money for a device that doesn't actually do much]
You can find a selection of alternatives, and homebrewed options, here: https://www.writerdeck.org/
Is that the true price for a low volume, niche product? Eink monopoly continues to make the world worse?
Looked it up, and the original One Laptop per Child came in around $200
My version uses ancient releases of Node and React for the UI for some horrible reason, and it is painfully slow.
I've rooted mine and have it as a project to look at the new OS and decide what to do with it, but if I had the cash I'd look elsewhere.
This is why I don't own a Freewrite. It should be such a simple device, but they found a way to make it complicated and lock it into their proprietary ecosystem. No thanks.
Then they released the new app, which looked like it was also just in userspace (not a kernel or fw update) so I wanted to start over with the update, but never got back to it.
And they're such a niche phenomenon that they have to do with the scraps left by other industries like ereaders.
I backed it myself.
I do see the Note Max as presently available, FWIW: <https://shop.boox.com/products/notemax>
I've had a previous iteration of their 13.3" tablet, the Max Lumi. Slightly lower resolution, and has a frontlight. It is a very nice display, though with an Android OS which I see as a net negative.
I'd really like an e-ink display option for the Framework 12" or 13" laptop.
Some challenges I've experienced: (1) Can't find A5-sized e-ink screens that accept HDMI as an input, (2) It would be cool to use a common Android phone, since there are many around. RaspberryPI is an option. Honestly, would love the simplest portable device that runs Debian Stable on a battery, (3) I have NOT been able to find small, A5-sized keyboards. Most small keyboards are cheap plastic bluetooth junk.
If anyone would like to seriously rally around this, let's talk'bout it. My vision for this laptop has always been "10:00 AM Austin Texas, sitting at a patio bar in direct sun, journalling/coding/writing". I have not been able to find any computer device that satisfies that situation, so there is obviously a market niche.
For foldable keyboards, if they are flimsy or stable matters.
I will say it is a really nice device, probably the all-around best of the dedicated writing devices I've owned and/or researched over the years. But on a typical value scale, it's not worth that.
1. work, having everything available in a desktop OS
2. personal, a console-only mode with a few basic functionalities I consider not time wasting: ebook reader, weather forecast, next sport events, 1 TV show episode per day, calculator, calendar, timer, etc
Since I use the extremely configurable awesomewm window manager, this switch would not be hard to implement and have me locked (somehow) based on day of the week or time on work days.
LE: actually, the console-only mode would be more of a menu-only one with something like rofi desktop [1]. Something very minimal and easy to use.
As I switch between Win and Linux, I have found FancyWM for win10/11 that should do the similar. (Ofc you’ve to use mouse in Windows.)
There is so much I wouldn't know or understand if I didn't go down the odd rabit hole.
But if my goal was to run daily and my first step was to make an open source step tracker with a raspberry pi dock...
It is how Linux used to be in the 1990s: tiny, simple, blindingly fast compared to the big lumbering commercial OSes...
... Which now are also Linux. Which is terribly terribly sad.
Sign me up.
I would like an audio device which can play mp3, podcasts, internet radio. Bonus points if it supports some kind of cartridge system, size between credit card and audio cassette. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
You're about to respond: "But many of these use Android, and general purpose computers are too distracting for me." In that case, you'll need to forego live internet audio streams and buy a closed option with a radio receiver.
That internet radio is a whole magnitude of complexity, especially with the need for wifi (cellular?) if it needs to be portable. But there are options like specially modified android devices.
I have the Shangling M0 with a 512GB card. I don’t even bother with converting my flac files. A nice other device is my kobo. It holds my entire fiction library with space to spare.
Get a second-hand Apple iPod Touch, remove all apps you don't need.
For just mp3 and podcasts: get an iPod Classic (or Video) and install Rockbox.
Rockbox is amazing.
I liked it and intend to use a similar setup in the future. There were quite a few "rough edges", unfortunately. In retrospect, a tiling window manager would have been a better choice.
I found Midnight Command to be great for this, with its integrated file manager, file viewer (mcview), editor (mcedit), and diff (mcdiff).
I didn't realize how much I relied on a unified clipboard until I didn't have one any longer. mcedit's clipboard was a file (or one of them was?), so I had to adjust some workflows.
The biggest problem came from my need to view a lot of PDF files. I had a framebuffer PDF viewer that was pretty clunky. It did not work with tmux and PDF files could not be opened directly from Midnight Commander as I recall. This specifically is why I'm thinking about a tiling window manager as I won't have to pick a clunky PDF viewer and the remainder will just work.
OP mentions SOCKS proxy but you can also just port-forward the one web ui port instead:
ssh -nNT writerdeck -L 8484:localhost:8384
The unreasonable effectiveness of…
All you need is…
But I like the overall idea.
It also fits in well with something I used to think about a lot: Computers and the internet have caused a major shift toward hiding a lot of things that used to be much more apparent.
E.g. your important papers would be in a physical file. Your books would be on the shelves. Your art on the walls. Visitors and family members could see them. Quite a few things I have in common with my late dad were a result of finding his books on the shelves as physical objects.
Now most of the books I've bought (and a couple I've written) over the last couple of decades are on my phone or my computer, and not visible to anyone who doesn't know where to look.
I've tried to be deliberate about showing my son the books I think he'll like, but those of my dads books, and manuscripts he wrote, that I ended up picking up and reading were only partially those he showed me - many more were books he had no inkling I'd like, or didn't think were age appropriate, that I stumbled on over the years.
Moving all of those things into files on general purpose devices, away from physical objects, feels like it is unmooring us from parts of our immediate surroundings.
It was pretty cheap (many used books are $1) and feels good to have my full library browsable and free from any platform or company.
https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos
At least the laptops that can still run DOS natively tend to have fairly good keyboards...
- I've forgotten virtually all my WP muscle-memory. Vim is where it's at. (I was once quite proficient at WP, but the last time I used it significantly was well over 30 years ago.)
- I find DOS apps tend to play poorly with any screen resolution other than 80x24 or so. I prefer more information density, but even running a console (rather than a terminal app) the experience tends to be subpar.
That said, for someone with familiarity with the apps and not too picky about resolution, that's an option.
It had such a pleasant interface for that time.
But yeah, one of the things made me go for vim over Emacs a long time ago was its relationship with touch typing and not leaving the home row with the vim modes.
Learn Vim script the hard way [1], even if you didn't end up writing any actual vim script, was a game changer in terms of understanding the semantics.
The final DOS WordPerfect works wonderfully on even early 21st century kit.
But it's not free. WordPerfect still exists and it's on sale.
So, in USB-DOS, I included WPEDIT, the WordPerfect plain text editor, which has the same UI but no formatting.
You didn't follow the link. You should have.
I built that USB-DOS tool and it contains a wide choice of word processors, from plain text editors with the WordPerfect command keys, to full-on professional tools, plus a choice of outliners and also a spreadsheet for the sort of writer who needs to model stuff -- like Andy Weir or John Barnes, to pick two I rather like.
I've well over 40 years muscle memory devoted to vi/vim. I like and prefer its plain-text approach, modality, and (as vim / neovim) syntax highlighting, regex text manipulation, piping filters, additional features, plugins, and the like. I've gone back to older tools from time to time ... and they simply don't measure up nor would their charms be worth the transition pain.
Amongst my dead-editor menagerie, for what it's worth: DOS Edit, EDLIN, EDT and EVE (VAX), the TSO/ISPF editor (VMS), MacWrite, MS Word, WordStar, AmiWrite, MS Word, Applixware, StarOffice and successors (OpenOffice, NeoOffice, etc.) emacs, Joe, ae, pico, and probably a few others lost to memory's dust. Some of those are still available, many are not, and one lesson I've come to is that learning non-expiring tools pays off in the long run.
Vim's where it's at for me, and so long as I'm running vim its integration and usefulness with the rest of the Linux / Unix userland precludes DOS.
If all you're doing is editing text, then DOS plus a suitable word processor could well work. Speaking for myself, and only myself, of course, it doesn't.
But thanks.
About 2-3Y into my career, IBM CUA came along and transformed DOS software: everything got a new CUA UI. Word 5, proprietary UI; Word 5.5, CUA. WordPerfect 4, proprietary UI; WP 5, CUA.
Since then, if an editor isn't CUA, life is too short: I won't even consider it.
There's a standard PC UI. All Linux GUIs follow it more or less, except for the ones that intentionally chose to Do Something Else, to Be Different for Difference's Sake. (GNOME, Elementary, a few others.)
It's time the shell/console world caught up.
Leave the old one as an option for the old timers. Everyone else gets CUA by default.
But that's just me.
I've since learnt the tool. Its ubiquity (particularly over pretty much all of the other ones I'd listed, at least on the machines I had ready access to) cemented that.
I did like EVE when I'd used it, but have had little access to VAXen since. And was proficient for a time on Emacs (until a subsequent gig's director insisted that if it didn't come installed software wouldn't be added to our Unix server). My WP-fu fell with the end of DOS, though I did hang on for quite some time, up to the late 1990s / early aughts.
CUA has its benefits, but it is only one of multiple competing keyboard standards. Everything is convention.
Oddly: I'm vi/vim in the editor, but readline on the shell. No, I don't set vimkeys bindings in Bash. But I do drop to bash as my shell editor.
Also: for those stumbling across this thread later, "Mastering the Vim Language" is an excellent video I'd come across in my third decade of using the editor, and learned much from. It's now 11 years old itself:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlR5gYd6um0>
Vim may have a long learning curve, but it also has a steep payoff function.
Veronica put a used laptop to work achieving much the same thing for next to nothing, except her time of course. It's not reverse-engineering an obscure Space Shuttle computer, but it's the kind of effort I think we want to reward on a site called Hacker News.
Not only for writing, but for shell sessions too.
I love my Raspberry Pi for that.
I've also always yearned for more usability from just the command line.
There's no tui spotify client, is there? Maybe I should break out my mp3 collection again... I'm trying to think of what else I'd really need to not need a GUI machine for my day to day. Maybe email?
Lynx and other tui browsers are not usable on today's web. Maybe there's a subculture to find somewhere that also appreciates reader-mode / lack of javascript?
If so anyone please lead me to the promise land!
At the same time the chat paradigm is very undercooked for any use case that isn't Google-like.
There is a tons of "modernized" TUI since Rust/Go, and even better terminal and shells.
I have never seen it crash or bug out.
Even the graphical version is excellent. They've resisted using a web view, thank god (giving you the side eye, Fedora)
A lot of respect and love for Debian!
I'm all on board with setting up a retro machine for fun, but if one wants to focus on writing, there are ways to achieve this that don't require the sacrifice of good font rendering, comfortable colours, etc.
The fact that the Music app notifies you of the new song is not some immovable law of nature...
I managed to publish my first book, second getting final review and third one is in editing... fully connected. AI came up with all the names for the characters, did a research on places and such. Huge help. I did check it all. For example a name AI claimed was French, totally was German and had to be replaced, but otherwise it is of huge help in writing if used correctly.
But here is a thing that made the most difference. Dictation. And not into dumb mac or phone transcriber. I use Typeless and used Superwhispt before, Typeless has amazing keyboard replacement and understand Serbian and transcribe it to English with minimal issues.
I dictate in my own Obsidian vault, to Inbox, which is then processed and sorted out by SidianSidekicks service (I am the founder). I look weird because I am talking to myself everywhere I go, but it is amazingly productive.
If I’m spending a lot of time with text I’d really like the text and editor to have a much better aesthetic appearance than what I’m seeing here.
I also think having something with graphical capability is nice to have but I know that’s a preference thing. For me, a mouse is a valuable tool in a text editor even if that usage is occasional.
I also think there is a lot of manual setup of things like keyboard brightness controls and battery status that are already built in to every mainstream Linux distro imaginable.
I would have gone about it in some other way like:
1. Install Fedora/Linux Mint/whatever
2. Make a login script that opens Obsidian or an editor of choice upon login and puts it in full screen mode.
3. Hide the KDE taskbar and/or just choose a highly minimal window manager.
4. Done.
The problem for me is getting myself to actually use it. Most of the time, it sits there gathering dust. If anyone has tips for this I'd love to hear them.
I do miss the old typewriter. Not so much the selectric era, but more the well-balanced instrumentation of a manual.
Still, there is a lot to be said for the amber glow of full-screened vim session on such a portable device.
The one thing I truly wish for, is a solar-powered writerdeck, i.e. 100% off grid, forever. Just like the good ol’ typewriter ..
It just ... Looks nicer..
Yes, I'm sure you can configure the others to look nice too but shrug OOTB is pretty nice.
i found something here, but i am not sure if these are the right ones: https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/share/misc/pcvtfonts?sort=Fil...
https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/wsfont?sort=File
https://github.com/fcambus/spleen
And yes, it’s quite nice.
spleen looks good. i am using gallant right now which is based on the old sparcstation console font: https://github.com/NanoBillion/gallant
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#/media/File:Wordpe...
I’m specifically struggling with large project editing. I have multiple projects that are hundreds of pages long, but need much more editorial efforts before they see the light of day. Editing anything longer than 10 pages feels like pulling teeth, so I end up underpublished.
Here are some more recommendations (not my repos): 1. helix-editor (rust based lightweight and fast) 2. Starship.sh (command line) 3. Nerd fonts (not sure how It will work only used with remote systems) 4. Zellij (cause it’s rust based not strong argument here) 5. Biased for ‘zsh’ too
No more of that! Thanks, this article!
2) More broadly, one tip I've found to reduce phone engagement is to set the phone to black & white only. It's significantly less interesting and prone to sucking you in. (You can do this on iOS & Android.)
Nope. We already had a frigging phrase for that, and it’s “completely valid”, not “valid AF” or “cromulent” or whatever. Dumb.
I’m calling it Writer’s Block. (I love carpentry and want it to look a bit like a wooden pencil case.) the prototype will be a literal log of wood (guess the name). It makes sense because the larger form factor allows for faster prototyping!
The default linux TTY is pretty barebones though. No unicode, and lots of TUI apps expect 256 colours. KMSCON looks like an interesting solution.
Those idle screens taunt me with a desire to use them for Slack or Hacker News when I’m trying to work.
my current 'protocol7' machine is my trusty old thinkpad x200. :)
I decided that unproductivity was unacceptable and so I simply engineered out the failure modes.
1. If I skipped a day on my project, the chance of catastrophic derailment increased exponentially. So I decided I had to work on it every day. (But only for an hour, to make it easy.)
2. If I waited until later in the day to begin working, the chance that I would miss a day increased exponentially. So I decided I had to work as soon as I woke up.
3. If I connected to the internet while working, the chance that I got derailed increased exponentially. So I just turned off my router and phone the night before. (Good for sleep hygiene, I did it an hour before bed and found that I could actually concentrate on paper books again, with the infinite Satans removed from my life. What a concept.)
Obviously unplugging your router is going to piss off your housemates, so a good alternative is buying a Wifi repeater for $10 and putting your devices on that. (You can just put them in airplane mode, of course -- but I find the physical ritual of yanking the damn thing out of the wall has something special to it.)
There are surprisingly many "portable" typewriter options out there (including electronic ones).
An odd laptop ($0) with free software ($0) makes more sense than buying another electronic device.
WorldDeck : 3D art / game development
GengoDeck : Japanese Immersion / Studying
TuneDeck : Making music.
SteamDeck : A deck for... oh I think this idea is taken.
Hmm. No i think I'll get back to working... for now.
my main concern with the setup was with the additional config required to make sure sleep states and other hw annoyances are in check. but it does help to have a well-supported linux machine as a base!
1. It's automatic (sure, scripting regular rsync syncs probably isn't hard, but...)
2. It's p2p across all my devices (which from what I understand is not how rsync operates)
So as long as my laptop and my desktop are both turned on I can trust they're always fully up-to-sync with each other, and in my experience they always are.
on the other hand, the accompanying video did mention rsync and a future video on syncthing, which might shed some more light on this decision.
X-Windows and it's ilk are awesome software.
For a single purpose machine it is unnecessary
I've been doing the same thing in different domains
not sure if i saw the link in the blog; but the youtube video attaches TFA as the companion blog post.
If you're already a tmux expert then zellij is probably no big deal, and the "written in rust" part is more of a red-herring than the headline.
Firstly, it doesn't conflict with Ctrl-A by default (but I think that's actually `screen`), second it has mouse support, floating window, saved layouts, stacked tabs, session picker/manager, and take a look at the configuration mechanism: https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/blob/main/zellij-utils/...
...for some reason it's just feels "super-sensible", comfortable, and allows a lot of flexibility.
The concept of "booting layouts" (a very poor-man's `docker compose` ;-) is really interesting and powerful:
https://zellij.dev/documentation/layouts.html
https://zellij.dev/documentation/creating-a-layout.html
...and I've got like a total of like 1.5hrs of zellij usage under my belt.
I've never been one to be super attached to screen/tmux, tried out byobu... none of them clicked in the same way with power, ease, and flexibility that zellij felt like it provided right away.
Again: this may be telling a vim user about the power of emacs, in which case just nod and smile and go about your day, but since these terminal multiplexers are effectively "just UX", then a "slightly different UX" may end up being in actuality the whole compelling product!
<evil wink>