This is an awesome setup. I like it, good job.

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.

There's a pattern that I notice a lot on HN.

"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)

This reads like someone with ADHD took Adderall and accidentally focused hard for a day on the wrong thing. It has happened to me.

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.

If anyone wants to try this without the intricate setup, if you have a linux system, you most probably can just press Ctrl+Alt+F3 and drop into a tty console directly. To return, you have to press Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+F2. You also have multiple consoles, up until F12 probably.

I used to use this a lot when trying for a less distracting desktop, just like in the original post.

The way people are coping with the current hellscape that is 2026 is interesting to me. Somehow, it always seems to be internalization. Like, if only I can lock in using this distraction free method, if only I start buying more physical media, if only I use a dumb phone and an mp3 player for my music, etc. etc., somehow that will resolve the intractable shitstorm happening right now. And none of that is even going to be a drop in the ocean in terms of making your life better. Only collective action has the potential to do that at this stage.

I'm desperately awaiting the perfect eink device for this.

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

This article reminded me of something I've been thinking a lot these past few months, that is having my computer split in 2 modes:

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.

[1] https://github.com/giomatfois62/rofi-desktop

All it's missing is WordPerfect 5.1 in DosBox!

i saw this video the other day on youtube (veronica's yt channel is great if you haven't watched!), and cool to see other people doing it as well. it reminded me of a similar setup i have, dubbed 'protocol7', which is a tty-only setup tailored for this kind of thing and for use on servers/headless pi setups. i use it for writing, intentional reading/browsing via lynx, managing gemini capsules (and reading gemini capsules - thank you amfora!), and just all-round "cozy computing". tmux-heavy, and (to me) very comfortable to use.

my current 'protocol7' machine is my trusty old thinkpad x200. :)

I recently installed Alpine Linux as part of a side quest and was blown away by just how fast it was without running a GUI or loading up a bunch of background programs. It was so fast a little voice has been telling me my daily driver laptop should run a minimal Linux distribution like Alpine.

Consider wordgrinder, a console word processor, as distinct from a text editor. https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder

I find fhe discourse here hilarious. Haven't most of us built our skillsets and careers out of side quests?

There is so much I wouldn't know or understand if I didn't go down the odd rabit hole.

> I'm trying to be more intentional with my tech choices. I want devices that do one thing really well, and that when I'm done with that one thing, I can put them away, and do something else. I don't want everything to follow me around everywhere.

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.

I had a similar setup in 2023, but the computer was reformatted after I moved. I wrote a HN comment about the setup before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792204

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.

> I had to set my syncthing web GUI to be listening on all addresses instead of just 127.0.0.1. I don't love this approach, but again, this thing has nothing private on it.

OP mentions SOCKS proxy but you can also just port-forward the one web ui port instead:

    ssh -nNT writerdeck -L 8484:localhost:8384

HN deletes certain words at the beginnings of submitted titles: could we add "It's time to talk about" and potentially also "my"?

Why not just use DOS? e.g.:

https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos

At least the laptops that can still run DOS natively tend to have fairly good keyboards...

I don't think I could go this far, because I'd have too many devices to switch between.

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.

Doogie Howser M.D. vibes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX0_Tuzr4wE

I have been writing for some time now, on a very large variety of devices, and my current go-to is an iPad and keyboard .. at various times the smart thingy (from Apple) .. but also often now lately with a Bluetooth logi .. just to give the joints a bit of variety as they get older and crankier ..

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's interesting to me how few people seem willing to just turn off notifications.

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...

fuzix (or serenityOS/Haiku)+mechanical or magnetic keyboard 60-80% but with home, arrow, ins, pgup-down del. And a week of working time on one charge

The stress relief of a plain old Linux terminal should not be underestimated.

Not only for writing, but for shell sessions too.

I love my Raspberry Pi for that.

I've wanted to do this for a while. Thanks for detailing your setup! I hope one day I find the time to try it.

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!

Great to see Veronica at the top of HN. She's a great creator, highly recommend her content.

This is a really interesting system. I find that I end up using an iPad with all my PDFs as reference materials when I'm writing, it would be nice to attach an external monitor in 'portrait' mode which exclusively hosted a single application that could let me select PDFs from my collection and display them on the screen. Then with one unit I'd have what I needed in one place.

I've always wanted to do this, but can't get over the linux tty only supporting 256 colors. If I could get that higher and maybe add unicode support, I'd love to go tty only.

I was really hoping to learn more about the actual writing process than someone’s Linux setup. It’s a bit too complicated for my taste, I can bang out about a thousand words an hour in a chrome tab, given a sufficient source of coffee and the opportunity to silence non-urgent notifications.

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.

I keep gravitating toward similar setups. Once you remove the option to fiddle with fonts and layouts, you're left with just the writing. Console-only Debian on an old laptop is about as distraction-free as it gets without going full typewriter.

Wonder if Lynx can connect to ChatGPT.

<evil wink>

interesting choice to use syncthing instead of rsync, given the OP is already comfortable with it. equally curious to see why it was not even mentioned nor discussed for regular readers/viewers.

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!

This is awesome and inspiring. I am almost always setup Linux as a server (command line only). Unless until I have need to have native gui. If needed ‘sshd’ to use from other machines.

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

I've accidentally made one of these; I broke X on an old thinkpad with Arch and never bothered to fix it.

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.

If anyone is considering using a computer like this, I'd recommend OpenBSD for it which genuinely has one of the prettiest console fonts.

It just ... Looks nicer..

Yes, I'm sure you can configure the others to look nice too but shrug OOTB is pretty nice.

Reminds me of word processing on DOS back in the 80s and early 90s. Pre-WYSIWYG.

I’m working on one! It’s early stage, but it’s relatively low latency e paper writing tool with my writing tool Ensō.

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!

1) Cool! Only think I can recommend is using use a taller 4:3-ish screen (like a Framework) for this. You could maybe have two columns of text available.

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.)

"Writerdeck' or simple word processor? They were first sold in the 1960s or 70s. Why? Buy, not build I'm thinking.

A couple years ago I was having difficulty working (couldn't get ADHD meds due to unspecified global calamity).

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.)

Gosh, this is everything I miss about my FreeBSD Vaio back in the day. Huh. Well. Thanks for the memories and heartily endorsing this based on past experience (before having a writing focus need, and so I’d never connected the dots)!

I have thought I need similar setup but for mobile to work on text notes, legacy iphone or something would be nice

Soooo.. not to sound like a luddite but to me the best dedicated writing device for me has been just pen and a notebook or a typewriter.

There are surprisingly many "portable" typewriter options out there (including electronic ones).

I use the same Mac to write that I use for everything else. But I find it’s more useful to disconnect from multiple screens and just use the laptop on my desk if I need to focus.

Those idle screens taunt me with a desire to use them for Slack or Hacker News when I’m trying to work.

Has me thinking about laser-focused task alternatives.

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.

Anybody else wonder how the screenshots were taken?

the key goal here seems to be to remove temptation. for me just switching to a virtual console and firing up vim there would be enough because switching back to the gui would involve typing a long password which i believe for me would be deterrent enough to not keep switching on a whim. if you are not as easily tempted then running a terminal in fullscreen might just be enough.

I would love a KingJim Pomera DM 250 but I can’t have it shipped easily and it is hard to find in a physical store.

Is this supposed to replicate the typewriter experience?

There's a lot of 'But what about' in the comments. I think it's a delightful setup. I love simplicity and tools that do one thing well.

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.