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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

On the note of terminal displays, I've been looking for a good e-Ink tablet that runs either Ubuntu Linux, or Android with access to the Play Store, and has a decent enough refresh rate so I could run an ssh client and code on it from time to time with a Bluetooth keyboard for eye strain relief, and for coding outdoors in full sun.

I have a couple of ideas:

A large e-Ink display connected to a Raspberry Pi

A Boox tablet

Are there any others I should consider for this use case? My biggest concern is refresh rate. I usually edit with vim. Greyscale syntax highlighting would be a plus.

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The community around the ReMarkable tablet has made a couple of solutions that makes it possible to use it as a second screen [0], and you could also replace the stock OS with Parabola-rM [1], a linux distro optimized for the ReMarkable. It's not cheap, but not terribly expensive either.

I'll get mine in a month or two and plan to try out how it works as a second screen for programing and writing.

[0]: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable#screen-shar...

[1]: http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/

Dasung Paperlike eink monitor! Super expensive unfortunately but they're pretty amazing.

https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/dasung-paperlike-3-hd-r...

That refresh rate looks amazing. I mean, damn, you could watch videos on that. But at $1300 it's a little outside my budget -_-

I have a boox, I think it would work fine for a linear text, but ssh would be a bit hard. you could type commands but a screen scroll would be a 1/4 second or more to reload.

I use the boox outside to read documents and then go back inside to code.

Some of the older e-ink kindles are very easy to get a shell on and are just running a buildroot with X11. The downside is that storage is limited and the partition scheme the OS it ships with is nearly android levels of goofy (all user data has to go on a FAT.)

I think I heard someone found an exploit on the most recent one. If the pinephone didn't exist that would be tempting (and it kind of still is, having a small portable Linux machine with a week of battery life was nice even if it could only hold 4Gb.)

If you've got money to burn, Waveshare have some nice e-ink displays that you could hook up to a Pi4.

https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1....

Have a look at this: https://alternativebit.fr/posts/ultimate-writer/

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