Text editor design for e-ink displays

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Style Pass

2024-11-24 21:30:03

NinjaTrappeur built the Ultimate Writer, a cypress TV typewriter for undistracted writing, and reports that writing in it is tolerable despite the e-ink display’s 2-second update delay, but editing is intolerable.

If you want to design a text editor for low-power e-ink displays, you probably want to minimize the number of pixels you update per character (and especially minimize full-screen refreshes) and also avoid unexpected full-screen refreshes. That’s because full screen updates take longer than partial screen updates and because they use a lot more energy.

This means that running vi or even ed on a standard terminal emulator is not going to work very well. Scrolling the whole screen up every time you want to display a new line at the bottom involves a waste of time and energy.

You can get a substantial improvement over scrolling, without changing the underlying typewriter model of ed/ex, in at least a couple of ways: the ntalk/Tek4014 approach and the Emacs approach.