Time to talk about my writerdeck

Very interesting! But how do you display images?

Before dunking on this lady for rolling her own writerdeck Linux distro, consider that I see advertisements for rather weaksauce devices, often with tiny LCD or, if they're posh, e-paper screens and very limited functionality compared to something like vim, for between $500 and $1200 USD. For an electric typewriter whose entire value proposition could have been achieved with a DOS PC.

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.

Just zellij instead of tmux, it's so much better!

Can I tangent to some love for the Debian TUI installer? Just seeing it evokes such pleasing thoughts. I don't think it's changed a whole lot in at least 10 years, maybe more. I think it's pretty well designed in terms of UX.

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've wanted to do this for general productivty; if I could find a good LLM to give me links I could forgo even a TUI web browser. perfect dev machine.

The default linux TTY is pretty barebones though. No unicode, and lots of TUI apps expect 256 colours. KMSCON looks like an interesting solution.

No.

Jesus christ I cannot believe it took this article for me to realize after so many years that leaving the root password empty would set my user up for sudo. Every single installation, the first thing I'd do is log in and lock root and give my user sudo!

No more of that! Thanks, this article!

Look, it does look like overkill but I totally understand you and where you are coming from...

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.

I think what would really make a nice writerdeck is an E-ink screen. Would be perfect for purely text based interface.

Good idea

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

This is what Lao Tzu writer studio will be once the hardware version drops. A specialized writing deck akin to a modern type writer but feature rich and sleeeeeek

I like the idea of the setup and the philosophy behind it but I don’t like the implementation as much.

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.

It looks like a chromebook running vim in a 50 point font. I can't wait to read 50 pages of how to do that!

Awesome machine. Missing Doom though.