How does it compare to, say, a remarkable tablet? I found the latter great for writing and reading well-formatted pages. But reading a typical whizzbang webpage or using an app to be painful. The lack of a mouse made life particularly difficult.
That being said I'm sure there's some magic you could do to reduce latency here if you tried. I know it does some magic behind the scenes with the drawing to improve responsiveness.
The way I understand the technology : refresh time looks related to how many pixels you draw at once. When you write with a pen, very few pixels have to change state on a given unit of time (the pixels under the stylus) the "magic" behind fast writing on e-ink is to draw the pixels under the pen as fast as possible then if needed add details once the user stops writing.
The problem with your terminal is once you reach the bottom of the screen and you start scrolling : from now on, every new line will redraw the entire screen. Now you are exactly drawing as much pixels as any e-book which is … slow.
You would need a terminal without scrolling (or some mid-page scrolling). This could probably be done but you would probably have problems with a lot of cli programs.
I’m less bothered about surfing the web on something like this.
When writing I find it easier to type and edit what I’ve put down.
Not sure if Remarkable has an optional keyboard or not but I think using a pen requires more thought overhead for me, if that makes any sense.
None of the bundled software is designed for using a keyboard, of course, so it’s going to be just as DIY as the very earliest Linux handhelds. (Anyone else remember the awful HP “iPaq” PDA Linux environment? I set one up because I could, and them never see the device again because the UX and battery life were so bad.)
If the goal is to get a distraction free writing tool all you really need is something like Vi, emacs or Wordstar/Joe in a terminal.
I never had an ipak but I did have a couple of Sharp Zaurus PDAs running Linux back in the day.
Just for kicks. I never did much with them.