I like writing. Really.

However, I have problem finishing my drafts. As you might be able to read in my OKRs, I mentioned multiple times that I have quite a lot of blog drafts that I havenât completed. I donât want to blame anyone and itâs completely my fault: I have problem focusing on a task. I have an attention problem. In the past, I could blame things like Twitter for distracting me from getting shit done. But now, I donât use any of these social media services anymore. I am running out of excuses.

I wanted to change my writing routine and would like to see if it would make a difference. Then, I watched a video by Veronica (of Veronica Explains) on her (new) writing setup. She reused an old laptop and made it a dedicated writing machine, or âwriterdeck.â In that writing machine, she only used command-line only Debian and neovim (her preferred text editor). Her blog post has details on her machine. I find the idea very interesting and wanted to give it a try.

First, I needed a spare laptop. 1 In fact, over the years my wife and I have accumulated a few unused but still functional laptops. I decided to take my wifeâs previous ThinkPad T440 with Intel i5 and 8G of RAM. 2 It is a perfectly capable machine, only it is unbelievably slow for my wifeâs relatively simple tasks such as watching YouTube. Modern web browsers are memory hog. And this is exactly the category of software a dedicated writing machine doesnât need.

I followed Veronicaâs blog post and installed Debian without any desktop environment and kmscon. My first diversion from Veronica is that I use emacs. I just quickly pulled my emacs configuration on my main machine from Git and removed all configurations about programming. emacs launches extremely fast 3 and should be so. You know, people bought 386 back in the late 80s to 90s to do similar things: launching DOS and write with Word Perfect or Word Star. 4 There is no way that an i5 machine cannot do that perfectly as it is perhaps 1000 times better than a 386.

With my own configuration, it also has all the emacs packages that I need for writing. And in fact, not that many: I only need deft to organize my files and Markdown mode (sorry I donât use org mode). I feel quite at home writing there. I donât want to waste a lot of time customizing. So I donât even want to install vterm and simply use eshell, as I probably donât need to do a lot of command line works. The machine now directly boots to emacs (just put emacs in .bashrc). More concretely, directly to deft (just add (deft) to my emacs configuration file).

Another diversion from Veronica is how I get the text files from the writing machine to other machines. I do not want to set up syncthing to sync text files across machines. I donât even want to have ssh server on any of my computers. My overkill solution is to just have a Git repository and have a remote on Codeberg. magit is also useful here to further reduce the command line usage. It is only my lack of imagination for using Git. Maybe in the future I will have something like rsync.

Then, I write. It is really great! Itâs extremely snappy and extremely minimal. And I can really focus on the writing, rather than being distracted (and frustrated) by the bullshit on MS Teams about my work. I also donât need to sit around my âwork desk.â I can also write from my couch while watching Tour de France.

There are still some minor nitpicks that I want to fix for this setup. One is the blinking cursor of kmscon 10.0.1. I can be easily frustrated by any blinking cursor. I think it will be fixed in the next official release. I see it over the official GitHub repository. 5 Another nitpick is the emacs theme. Many emacs themes were developed for the graphical mode. I want to use a bright theme (e.g., solarized). But it displays quite badly on kmscon. But the default dark theme is fine.

With this new setup, I think I will be able to finish my backlog of drafts and also some new academic writing tasks.

I did consider an alternative of building myself an oversized handheld computer with something like a Raspberry Pi Zero. But upon self-reflection, I donât want to create more E Waste, as I have enough E Waste at home. I should reuse something that is otherwise E Waste, so that it is no longer a waste. ↩

I bought it already preowned. ↩

emacs is reasonbly fast that I donât even bother to set up emacs server. And I should not need to launch emacs very often. ↩

Some prominent writers still write in this kind of setup. The most famous is of course George R. R. Martin and his DOS computer with WordStar. ↩

It is too much for me to compile kmscon on the writing machine. So, I will just wait. ↩