The Termux Linux terminal and environment (https://termux.com/) is installable via F-Droid. Among the terminal schemes is an e-ink mode of dark-on-light. Font size is scalable.
Through Termux you have your choice of terminal-mode editors, including vim, emacs, nano, pico, and numerous others.
The handwriten notes feature is also quite good. Text-recognition is a bit iffy but does work.
My main reservation with this setup is that Android's memory management is fatally flawed and processes can be terminated at any time without warning. Terminal sessions really ought to be exemptable from that, but AFAIK they are not. (Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.)
Still, it's a quite good environment with nearly 1,500 packages available using the APT package tool.
Smaller current BOOX devices start at about US$250, used could likely be less than this.
Any Android or LineageOS -capable device should be able to function likewise. There are a few Linux-based devices also on the market (and yes, Kobo is one), including the reMarkable tablet (my major gripe: 16 GB storage is simply stupidly small, this supports a cabled keyboard but not AFAIU Bluetooth), and devices from Pine (in process) and possibly Purism.
A longer review of the Onyx BOOX here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521248
http://bbs.onyx-international.com/t/please-provide-source-co...
https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/hsyigm/on...
Boox air does this.
This is in addition to their constant connections to their cloud in California, which also happen if you never sign up for any services.
tcpdump doesn't lie.
I was considering iPad but would be happy not to get another LED a screen
It's unbelievable, Would we allow this behavior on desktop OS? Mobile operating systems seems to have taken the worst features from typical computer and embedded systems. But who dare question the Duopoly.
I just had rant about this the other day with reg Google Clock not functioning and people loosing jobs because of it[1].
That... is actually a feature of the Linux Kernel. How else would you handle the exhaustion of physical + swap memory or file descriptors, etc.?
I use a 6" Nook but they have an 8" version that is just as easy to set up additional apps on.
I'm glad we have better options nowadays.
Good fitness machines though, because you better have strong fingers to type all day long with these devices.
You can see the 8bit guy demo one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNs-QIMHCJA
I am not sure in which sense you meant that, but my "E-Ink typewriter" (Onyx + BT Keyboard) has never been online.
The basic models like the classic iMac Themed 3000 were the best models for this but the Neo gets you a better screen and keyboard.
The LCDs simply do not lend themselves to the same amazing outdoor visibility as modern e-ink displays.
The only way to get your words off is to connect the device over USB to a receiving computer and "send" the text one letter at a time. To be fair it's fairly cool to see the AlphaSmart emulate itself as a keyboard device to Windows and shoot text over faster than any human could ever type, but it's still incredibly slow, can take minutes at a time to transfer single documents.
I own an AlphaSmart Dana - one of the last devices they ever made - and it suffers from many of these issues far worse. It ran a slightly customized version of PalmOS, so it slurped up batteries like nothing, still had non-persistent internal storage, did include an SD card slot but its own writing software saved files in a proprietary format you couldn't open on any computer, so you still had to use the USB keyboard method...
The AlphaSmart devices were made to teach little kids how to type, and not much more. And that is very clear.
Yes, the transfer speeds are slow. On the other hand you can pull up any program that accepts keyboard input on your computer, plug it in, and hit send. You are not messing around with files are proprietary software to transfer those files.
It also takes a lot more than the batteries to die to lose your data. Like many older devices, it has a backup battery to maintain the contents of memory. Both the main batteries and the backup batteries have to be dead to lose data, which is tricky to do since the device will only run from the main batteries.
That said, the editor is very primitive and it is awkward to navigate by word and line alone while editing documents.
One thing I've been thinking about is having a computer hooked up to a rudimentary word processor app on my kindle. The kindle's display doesn't bother me after I'm done working on screens. It feels different enough that it doesn't interrupt my reading, so I've posited that I would be okay writing on one.
I'm excited to see technology like this come out, and I'm excited to see how this little industry grows.
I have recently bought a Onyx BOOX Nova which I plan to use via a bluetooth keyboard when it arrives. I had the exact same thought regarding e-ink displays since I read a lot using a kindle after work.
You just need an Android tablet with EPD display and a decent word processor.
If you do not want full formatting - so, you are contented with typewriter like rendering -, there must be abundance of software application. If you want proper typographical paragraph formatting, with e.g. full text justification and spacing etc., there are a few usable applications. (As written in anther post, in the end, to have an application with all the features I wanted, I wrote it directly.)
It's also more difficult to get distracted while using a real terminal, because of its inherent limitations as a textual output device.
Lately I've been dreaming of building a credit-card sized computer (thickness included) using a e-ink display and ultrathin battery. I haven't found a good purpose for it though.
Speaking of E-Ink, if you remember the "Thinkpad X230 with “e-Ink” display at 30fps": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860609, I'm selling two of them: https://www.ebay.com/itm/255123140172
I spend hours per day in front of an Onyx Max2 (13.3'' E-Ink + Android) landscape on a full sized BT keyboard with a long slot to accommodate big tablets, and I use a full fledged word processor.
The catch is, I was dissatisfied with all word processors available for Android, so I wrote mine (and I get rich text in full book-like formatting with optimized use of the screen).
Can you please share the name or link?
BTW: battery life is never a problem. The rare events in which I find myself with the red light blinking, I just hook up a portable power bank.
Unfortunately I can't recommend boox anymore, a tiny crack appeared on my note air pretty much where my thumb goes when holding it and spread across the entire display; warranty was useless of course.
> trying to recreate a more perfect Apple Newton with the external keyboard option
I wasn't alive when that was produced, does that mean I am trying to recreate something I don't know about?
I think I get it though, it sounds like it was a product you liked. Excuse the above sarcasm, i just get frustrated that this whole 'repurposing black box tech' is a even thing and I wish we lived in the modular open source and anticapitalist/socialist world of tomorrow, today.
But there is just no way on this earth I could ever justify paying $600 USD for what amounts to an e-ink display strapped to a Cherry MX keyboard.
I got a Pomera DM30 instead, which just appears as a USB drive mirroring the device's filesystem. It's a Japanese keyboard layout, but the English support is fine, and overall I love it.
Some observations:
The link to the developer homepage in the iOS app store points to msol.io (which appears to be broken/recently registered).
The app is lacking a privacy policy.
See for instance this post by Nick Temple: https://nicktemple.com/blog/remarkable-keyboard/
If you're taken aback by the steep price tag: from my understanding that's a combination of small volume and the patent situation with e-ink which has been holding the technology back. Seriously, I'm very frustrated with that; essentially these things haven't gotten all that much better (in general, not talking about volume customers like amazon) than the first time I read about them in what, 2005?
