
Writer: An Open Digital Typewriter (2018) - mzehrer
https://alternativebit.fr/posts/ultimate-writer/
======
sigwinch28
This seems more like a _word processor_ than a _typewriter_. The author seems
to concede that this isn't a typewriter at all:

> However, using a typewriter comes with two major shortcomings: 1) You cannot
> delete a typo. I know you do a lot of those, no need to expose this nasty
> behaviour to everybody’s face. 2) You cannot share the text you wrote
> online, be it on your website or on any other social platform.

Also, I am not a fan of the bulky wooden case, but I get that some people
would be. I think that this would be a great opportunity to take inspiration
from devices like the iPad (Pro) and Nintendo switch: perhaps the meat of the
device (display, electronics, connectors) could be in a single unit, with a
detachable keyboard of some kind. Then, people would be free to create their
own "docks" out of wood, old model M keyboards, pipe organs or whatever which
could connect to this device using a single connector.

That aside, I really like the concept: hacker-friendly open design, a "more
pure" writing experience, and a "real" operating system underneath it all
which can be modified by the user.

~~~
simias
I assume it's sort of in-between the typewriter and modern word processor
experience: you can undo what you type and insert text for instance, but given
the slow refresh rate of the screen it will be tedious so you'll probably want
to limit it as much as possible.

As such I think it can work well for people looking for a "typewriter" in
order not to be distracted while they're writing something. Just throw your
thoughts on e-paper and edit them properly later on a real computer. So
obviously technologically-speaking it's much closer to a computer than it is
to a typewriter, but usability-wise the parallel might be more obvious.

My main issue with this design is that the screen is too small IMO, but of
course I assume that large e-ink screens must be quite costly.

~~~
sigwinch28
I have a colleague who uses an ~A4 e-reader with a digital pen/pencil thing
for reading academic papers.

He claims it allows him to focus on the work, keep backup copies of his notes
(he can draw right on the PDFs and then save them to "the cloud", I think),
and although it has an experimental web browser, he keeps it in Airplane mode
when working.

~~~
earthboundkid
Almost certainly, it is the ReMarkable:
[https://remarkable.com](https://remarkable.com)

~~~
sigwinch28
It is!

------
megous
I have some docs on how to drive one of those spare eBook reader eInk screens
from my reverse engineering adventure of PocketBook: [http://linux-
sunxi.org/PocketBook_Touch_Lux_3](http://linux-
sunxi.org/PocketBook_Touch_Lux_3)

I've mainlined the support for this PocketBook to Linux 5.7.

Though if I was doing this project I'd re-use the PocketBook board too,
instead of building new HW to drive the screen. Driving the eInk signals on
larger screens requires a very fast and precise signalling, and you also have
to generate around 5 different voltages for the screen. And the board can
already do that and the SW (bootloader, kernel) is all open source, so there's
no downside. You could drop the RPI.

~~~
prashnts
Wow, this is inspiring work that I wish I’d seen earlier.

Here’s my ipython notebook that I used to extract LUTs from an eInk dev panel
[1] which eInk support declined to give us the LUTs for.

I’d stopped after I managed to display some images but I now I have a reason
to revisit and play with the PocketBook Linux. Thank you!

[1] [https://github.com/prashnts/betty-
epd/blob/master/notebooks/...](https://github.com/prashnts/betty-
epd/blob/master/notebooks/15-17--logic-analysis-spi.ipynb)

------
LB232323
I work as a writer and love the concept, but the size of the screen is the one
major drawback. Both the commercialized version ($550!) and the hacker version
have tiny screens that do not compare to a laptop with a word processor or a
typewriter with standard size paper.

If they scaled the screen size up, I would definitely consider this for
professional use. Otherwise, it seems kind of inconvenient compared to the
traditional methods.

The most attractive features are the e-ink screen, the long lasting battery,
and the minimal design. Writing without getting distracted is more a matter of
personal discipline than advanced technology. If anything, having internet
access while writing is very convenient for research.

~~~
edraferi
The FreeWrite is $550 US

[https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-smart-
typewriter](https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-smart-typewriter)

~~~
serf
looking straight down at a flat screen seems like terrible ergonomics.

It reminds me of the sit-down Space Invaders arcade cabinets. I used to love
them as a kid, and I remember the neck aches.[0]

I like the idea of a modern typewriter. I just haven't found any decent
implementations that I like yet.

[0]:
[https://i.warosu.org/data/vr/img/0009/72/1376119589459.jpg](https://i.warosu.org/data/vr/img/0009/72/1376119589459.jpg)

~~~
slantyyz
>> looking straight down at a flat screen seems like terrible ergonomics.

Real typewriters weren't much better though. You were basically still looking
down at the piece of paper in the platen.

~~~
derefr
“Real typewriters”, for much of their lives, were mostly write-only devices.
You didn’t _interactively edit_ with a typewriter; you _drafted_ —typing
something out without really being able to see the result very well, except
when you get a paragraph or so further along—and then, when you were done,
you’d pull the sheet out, write editing marks on it (or your editor would),
and then you (or a typist) would take the sheet+editing marks and _transcribe_
the result through another typewriter, to get a cleaned result. (Any mistakes
made during transcribing would result in starting over on transcribing that
sheet. Unless you had one of the fancy typewriters with a secondary white-out
ribbon, _and_ the result was just heading for a fax machine anyway.)

Really, it was a major revolution when the first word processors came ‘round,
and you got a little LCD display one-line buffer, that you could commit to the
paper or re-write.

~~~
slantyyz
> were mostly write-only devices.

True.

In the mid eighties though, there were electronic daisy-wheel typewriters (I
don't consider those to be word processors in the same vein as the Wang word
processors that had full green screens) that had one line LCD screens that
would let you edit the line before imprinting it onto the paper.

On a side note, remember how "letter quality" was considered a thing back
then, because dot matrix printers could only achieve "near-letter-quality"?
Those terms aren't even in today's vernacular.

> Unless you had one of the fancy typewriters with a secondary white-out
> ribbon,

Even without a fancy typewriter, there were handheld white out sheets you
could get, white tape, or you could use liquid paper.

~~~
derefr
> Even without a fancy typewriter, there were handheld white out sheets you
> could get, white tape, or you could use liquid paper.

True, but if your transcription was being handled by a professional typist,
often the process of handling manual white-out taping (followed by re-
feeding/aligning the sheet to its previous position) would be slower than just
re-typing the entire page! The secondary white-out ribbons were the only thing
I saw used in practice (by anyone other than slow-as-molasses government
bureaucracies), because they didn’t require re-feeding the paper.

~~~
slantyyz
> True, but if your transcription was being handled by a professional
> typist...

I tend to think business users at the time had the fancy typewriters or word
processors, while home/student users were limited to whatever correction tools
they could afford.

As a student, prior to getting a dot matrix printer, I would use either liquid
paper or those powdered correction sheets to fix typos.

------
derefr
The “right thing” here, if:

• you’ve got a RasPi running Linux (Raspbian)

• you want to drive a novel display with it

• you want the contents of the display to be regular Linux text-mode console
output, with regular Linux text-mode console input

...would be to just write a Linux kernel framebuffer driver for your novel
display device, and then drop it into the Raspbian kernel tree, recompile, and
deploy to your device, no?

Then there’d be no other custom software needed. You’d just have a regular
Linux system, with a regular Linux console TTY, mapped to a grid of pixels by
the Linux framebuffer code (bonus: in whatever bitmap font you wish), in turn
bit-banged to the display device’s IO port using your driver’s custom refresh
sequences.

Sure, this approach requires learning some new codebases (Linux kernel driver
development!) but so does the “user-mode driver” approach in the article.

~~~
lproven
I think the thing is that an e-ink display isn't a typical display.

Linux is an xNix. xNix was written for teletypes: a fundamentally scrolling
medium.

E-ink does not scroll well. Updating the whole display is bad. It take a long
time, it blurs into illegibility, it could even wear out the panel.

Compare to the behaviour of 1980s 8-bit machines.

Examples:

• Sinclair BASIC's knew that scrolling took a long time and was CPU-intensive,
and so when it was happening, it was hard to interrupt -- it would be slow
anyway, and if you kept polling for an interrupt keystroke it would be slower
still. So, when the screen was about to scroll, they prompted: ... scroll?
(Y/N) And you could say no.

• The Locoscript word-processor for the Amstrad PCW range (maybe the best-
selling CP/M machines in history, with millions of units of only about 3
models). LocoScript was one of the most polished 8-bit WPs ever. The
programmers knew that trying to move all the text along the screen live when
inserting would be painfully slow, so when you went back to add a word, it
split the text at that point. The next line was moved down a blank line, and
so did not have to update or reformat. If you added more than a line, the text
below only had to be scrolled once per line. When you were finished and moved
the cursor past the insertion point, it reflowed and redrew the text from then
on -- just once.

But these are specific niche programs. It's not possible to be so general on
Linux because you don't know what program will write what to the screen.

The problem is this:

What you really want to do with e-ink is to fill the screen, either all at
once -- no use for interactivity -- or one character at a time (which is
doable), and then when it gets to the end.

So how about: a pseudo-terminal that detects when the console is about to
scroll, and instead of scrolling, just resets the whole thing, clears the
screen, and starts to redraw it again at top left.

Continuous output -- e.g. dmesg or catting a file -- would fill the screen,
clear it, and redraw, over and over.

Full-screen editors would need to be aware of it but there are about a million
FOSS text editors out there. This is not beyond the wit of mankind.

------
fbelzile
Not sure if this plug is welcome here, but I'm seeing some comments suggesting
that people are looking for this sort of thing:

If anyone is looking for a practical, distraction-free typing environment,
check out my freemium app called Cold Turkey Writer:
[https://getcoldturkey.com/writer/](https://getcoldturkey.com/writer/)

Writer locks you into the app for a certain amount of time or until you type a
certain number of words.

It's free, but the pro version also lets you disable the backspace/delete key,
arrow keys, selecting text, etc...

I hope it helps someone here!

------
afandian
It's great to see people's takes on the idea. I have been mulling something
similar. I've bought a couple of old Alphasmart units, which were originally
designed to do exactly this: simple word processsors with the ability to dump
text via a keyboard interface.

They have a keyboard and standard four line LCD character interface. I'm
planning to stick an ESP32 inside and make it dump text via wifi.

After all that, you have to find something to write. I wonder whether having
grown up with a random-access word processor makes it difficult to write this
way.

------
mattkevan
Still use my old Newton eMate as a distraction-free writing device.

The keyboard is great, NewtonWorks is a capable word processor, the battery
life is amazing and it makes cute beep boop noises when you touch the screen.
Plus it looks like something David Cronenberg would design.

I've occasionally thought about modding it to house a rPi, but it would be
sacrilege to gut something like that when it still works.

Incidentally, if anyone has a broken eMate knocking around I'd be very
interested.

~~~
cpach
Cool! How do you transfer documents to your main computer?

~~~
mattkevan
I've got a serial-to-USB adapter, and NCX [0] by Simon Bell is a fully-
featured device manager for importing and exporting documents, installing
packages etc. It's basically a modern replacement for Apple's old Newton
Connection Utilities.

[0]
[https://newtonresearch.org/connection/index.html](https://newtonresearch.org/connection/index.html)

~~~
afandian
Thanks so much for bringing this up! I had lost all hope. I might get out my
old eMate and MessagePad!

------
jacobush
There was a similar commercial product, basically a PC keyboard with a small
(LCD?) screen, for typing text only documents. It was distraction free, and
pretty cheap for something with great battery time. I think notebooks were
very expensive back when it was launched.

You'd then download your texts into a computer.

I can't recall the name. I think it ran on regular alkaline AA cells. It
attracted a bit of a cult following.

Edit: I think I must be thinking of the Alphasmart line - with products from
1993-2013:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart)

Back before that, journalists used battery powered versions of the TRS-80 and
even a modem to upload their texts to their news magazine.

A modern take is:

[https://getfreewrite.com/](https://getfreewrite.com/)

~~~
tyingq
In the late 70's and early 80's there were really high end CRT word processors
from companies like Xerox, Wang and Burroughs. I recall managers debating
buying these versus general purpose computers.

At the time, that's mostly what you did with general purpose
computers...WordStar or similar. Spreadsheets hadn't really taken off yet.

Edit: Check Google for the Xerox 860. It was the Cadillac at the time.
[https://www.old-
computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=488](https://www.old-
computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=488)

~~~
slantyyz
I had a summer job around 1990 as a word processor using a Wang and a
dictaphone. While this was definitely at the end of the era of the dedicated
word processor, it was an interesting environment to be in. I was one of two
dedicated word processors at the company.

It was quite a different world back then, because I would type up a lot of
memos that would get physically posted on bulletin boards in public areas, and
cc: (carbon copies), while no longer using carbon paper, meant that you were
making physical cc's that were being distributed manually.

~~~
tyingq
I remember being very productive with WordStar, with muscle memory better than
what I have now with vim. I could type like the wind, make corrections,
reformat, and print in a sort of _" out of body"_ way where my thoughts just
flowed.

I haven't really experienced that since. Maybe the single tasking environment
kept me more focused.

~~~
slantyyz
Well, back in those days, styling choices could be incredibly limited
(depending on whether you were using a green screen vs gui), especially if the
word processor's output was limited to a daisy wheel printer.

I think the vast number of styling and formatting options these days can
easily distract writers from... writing, which is probably why Markdown and
focused writing tools have become so popular.

~~~
tyingq
Very true. WordStar gave me headings, bullets, bold, italic, etc. But not much
more. Kept my focus on the words.

~~~
garganzol
You may find WordGrinder by David Given a treat. It is the most close
resemblance of WordStar experience nowadays and it is free.

~~~
tyingq
Amen. <ctrl>KP to my friends. I will check it out. The link:
[http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/index.html](http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/index.html)

------
cpach
Very cool project! Would love to have one of those :)

An acquaintance of mine pointed out that since this project was created there
is a new driver in the Linux kernel for working with e-ink-displays:
[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/tiny/repaper.c)
(Don't know what kind of hardware it supports though.)

------
upofadown
>However, I find the current screen refresh rate way too low.

Emacs does (or did) different things depending on the data rate of the
terminal. If the rate was low enough, it would do stuff to avoid having to
redraw the text.

* [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Te...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Terminal-Output.html)

Added: I just tried it with the rate set to 110 baud (for sentimental reasons)
and emacs started leaving half the screen to fill in every time I hit the top
or bottom of the screen. The general idea seemed to be to keep the cursor
vertically near the middle of the screen as much as possible. Good for adding
new text on a eink display. Wouldn't help if you were overwriting existing
text unless you were willing to leave the old text there for a time.

------
bravoetch
I have the astrohaus freewrite, fully closed source metal case implementation
of this idea. It's well done in some ways. The keyboard is great, the case and
screen are good.

Where it falls down is the workflow. They require you be signed in to the
device as config changes can only be done online on their website. If you
don't use qwerty layout or want to change the font size you have to be online
to make those changes.

While documents can be accessed locally via USB, you cannot delete a document.
Only copy it.

It just has enough weirdo limitations like this that I never use it and always
turn to my MacBook, a stand, and an external mechanical keyboard. I get a ton
of writing done in scrivener with this setup.

If they open-sourced the freewrite it could be the dream!

------
tyingq
"Typewriter" seems like a misnomer here. But, the article dives into grabbing
a terminal emulator, ripping X11 out, and replacing it with the primitives to
draw to an e-ink display. Which is more interesting to me than a typewriter.

------
anthk
Better if instead of a limited sw they bundled a tiny image of NetBSD/OpenWRT
with ed(1) as the default text editor and spell(1).

A lot of people would hack it in order to run drotz(6) but that's a feature.

~~~
fallat
Just use `cat`.

~~~
anthk
Ed has line editing, regex and i/o.

------
donatj
I've owned an AlphaSmart for years, and it's a great prebuilt machine for
roughly this purpose.

I type out my thoughts, plug it into my computer, hit a key and it dumps the
entire thing into whatever editor you have open by emulating a USB keyboard.
Great little device. Before I built my own editor, I used it all the time.

Disclaimer: Due to acquisition I now work for a company who at one time
produced AlphaSmart machines. I however owned and loved the AlphaSmart prior
to this.

~~~
pseingatl
Please tell them to start making them again!

------
DanBC
I love this!

"Electronic typewriters" have a long history. Here's one from 1973ish:

[https://deramp.com/swtpc.com/RadioElectronics/TV_Typewriter....](https://deramp.com/swtpc.com/RadioElectronics/TV_Typewriter.htm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter)

------
scandox
This is fantastic. I was dying to do something like this. Tried with an ESP32
and an LCD, but just didn't have the chops to get it working.

Love it. If you're willing to make me one by hand, I'll certainly pay you for
it.

------
Koshkin
But wait, there's more:

[https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/the-best-raspberry-
pi...](https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/the-best-raspberry-pi-laptop-
kits)

------
corny
If using macos and want a distraction-free writing environment, create a new
user with strict parental controls. Allow access to zero web sites and limit
app usage to just your word processor.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18239242](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18239242)

------
wyclif
It would be easy enough to create a fold-down wrist rest at the front of the
box to alleviate some of the comfort issues he mentions.

------
skunflyk12
"I am easily distracted."

Well... I distracted myself with this awesome blog

------
Hoasi
Beautiful work. And witty also. Indeed restriction fuels creativity.

------
EvanAnderson
I wonder how many hyperlinks there are in the text that I missed. I'm reading
on my phone and the styling of hyperlinks makes them completely un-
discoverable (short tapping every word in the text). Why bother having any
links at all with that kind of styling?

~~~
kroltan
What do you mean, they all have a orange underline...?

~~~
EvanAnderson
I've got an older iPhone landlocked on an older iOS version. The old Mobile
Safari version isn't showing the underlines. Once I looked at the site on a
desktop browser I saw the links were styled w/ orange underlines. I haven't
looked at the CSS to see why it's happening. I would have deleted the parent
post here if I'd gotten to it in time.

------
Lanrei
> The mechanical keyboard is a 61 keys Chinese bootleg.

This guy obviously doesn't know anything about keyboards.

------
russellbeattie
Unless you're Steve Wozniak in 1977, wood and computers never go well
together. Better to buy some opaque acrylic sheets for it instead. It's about
as easy to cut and glue (chemically weld actually) together and looks much
better. 3D printing is also an option.

~~~
garganzol
Wood is a simple and pleasant material to work with.

Back in the day I built a prototype of the vending machine with the wooden
chassis to hold the electronic hardware. Later, the design was industrialized
and mass produced in the quantity of hundreds. The industrial units came
without the wooden parts, of course.

Mind you, no problems whatsoever. Wood did a great job!

