This made it occur to me that a tablet that mimics the form of electric typewriters—a fixed-width LCD screen, a bit akin to those on simple calculators, with the full page above it, and text from the LCD appended to the "page" when you move to the next line—might actually be awesome for writing, coupled with an external keyboard. Potentially-very-low input latency while typing, and no page-flickering except when changing lines. You could even scroll back to edit.
Right—that, but stick a big e-ink display above it. USB port and bluetooth so you can use an external keyboard (though a compact attached keyboard/stand isn't a bad idea, even if it's kinda a shitty keyboard).
Like this, but instead of printing your finished line to paper it "prints" to e-ink:
(I personally wouldn't touch one -- I need multiple lines of text in order to frame my thoughts in context, never mind that I like being able to dive online to do impromptu research as I write -- but I can see it appealing to some folks. 100 hour battery life is the obvious draw.)
Exactly this. About 7 years ago I bought a secondhand Alphasmart and started using it. I loved it for what it was but I had to stop using it because I could not see enough of what I had written.
I’m now using a Pi with a monitor in portrait mode and FocusWriter to write. It is a fantastic single purpose writing device. But I would pay money for something similar with reasonable screen real estate I could stick in a bag.
Now that I think about it, it’s a little surprising there hasn’t been a first party keyboard attachment for Kindles, Kobos, or the reMarkable tablet yet. Maybe the reMarkable at least supports keyboards via bluetooth. There’s many of us who would rather have the kb instead of the stylus. Or with the kb as main input with the stylus supplementary.
Sort of, but with a one-line old-school monochrome text LCD. You type and edit your line there for near-instant input latency, and the e-ink screen only refreshes when you change lines. It's how that kind of electric typewriter worked, except instead of e-ink it printed to paper when you finished a line.
