On E-paper displays - 14 January 2017
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So I read a phlog by Tomasino[0] recently  where  he  is  talking  about
kindles and running terminal applications on kindles.

I would love to have a *nix console running on an epaper display (like a
kindle), it seems like a perfect match to me. Now I don't think that the
technology   is  quite  there  yet  to  make  the  terminal  a  pleasant
experience, as the refresh rates are really slow, but  currently  it  is
doable,  and  some people have got debian to run on their kindles. There
are even e-paper displays that can display three colors: red, white, and
black;  This would work well for a terminal, you could for example print
everything for standard error in red.

It would be really cool if a company would realease an  e-paper  laptop.
Geeks like me could run all the terminal apps we wanted, and the battery
life could be days or weeks instead of the few hours that  most  laptops
afford us. There is a company that is working on such a device, the boox
typewriter, but their device is just an android tablet with  a  keyboard
that  attaches  at the bottom. This is a bit dissapointing to me; Having
it preloaded with android is going to make it harder to stick a *nix iso
on  the  device  and  the  IO is probably gonna suck, as it's built as a
tablet and going to have just a headphone  jack  and  a  microusb  port.
What I want is a traditional laptop with an e-paper display, but sadly I
don't such a device is ever going to hit the market.

I also wish companies would make their e-readers a little more hackable.
The  extra  functionality  wouldn't  have  to  be exposed to the average
consumer, it could be accessed for example by plugging the e-reader into
a computer and editing a config file. It would be great if you could buy
an e-reader and out of the box use it as a monitor, run  a  terminal  on
it,  or  even  load  your own applications on it. I wish I could do this
with my kindle paperwhite, there is alot of software descisions  that  I
wish  I  could  change,  like  making it so that text files displayed in
monospace and had word wrapping, or if you  could  view  webpages  in  a
paginated  fashion  instead  of having to scroll through them (Scrolling
should never happen on e-paper in my opinion).

I like e-paper alot -- it has much potential but is mainly only used for
ebooks, which is a little dissapointing.

REFRENCES
    [0] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/tomasino/phlog/20180113-kindles