WRITER DECK
2025-05-16

I have made myself a writer deck. Nothing fancy though like what
you can find on the surface web. I just bought a second handed
laptop, installed Debian on it, then went to search for the least
distracting environment possible. The idea was:

  - power up,
  - log into TTY (optional: could consider auto-login),
  - launch the editor (optional: run it automatically at session
    start),
  - write.

Basically, I wanted simplicity: power up, then write.

For the laptop I wanted something as light and thin as it can be,
so I finally found a MacBook Air 11" from 2012 for a handful of
euros on eBay. These machines are as deplorable as you can ima-
gine.

Most components are soldered, the hard disk has proprietary con-
nectors, and there are very few ports (2 USB3.0, 1 jack and 1
Apple thing whose name I've forgotten). There's virtually no
possibility of upgrading; they were clearly made for being dis-
posable. And thanks to that, it is why you can find a bunch of
people selling their own on eBay at cheap prices.

But since I just need a digital typewriter, all of this is fine
for me. For what I plan to do, the Core i5 is almost too much, as
for the 128Go SSD which I can never imagine filling it complete-
ly with my plain text files. I'm not a fan of the keyboard but it
does the job, and the screen is cool. Finally the batterie I in-
herited seems to be in good shape and is holding up to its adver-
tised five hours. And the general condition of the computer I
bought is great.

Debian on it runs smoothly. I was planning to use the machine on-
ly in TTY, so I installed the Terminus console font set and
emacs, and...

I didn't wrote. Like, nothing. Nothing, nothing. For two months.

Since I bought it, I turned on my new shiny writing deck almost
everyday and looked at the screen without ever really writing
anything. A few corrections in some drafts, a lot of reading, but
nothing more. I knew it had something to do with the environment.
So I tried other more simplier text editor (you name them), but
still nothing.

Eventually, I decided to put all that aside for a while and turn
this machine into a retro games console. So I installed Xorg
(which I didn't want at first since a graphical environment leads
me to distraction) and then DOSBox. I went digging in my archives
and brought back my old DOS folder with the games and others ap-
plications in it I'd been keeping for years.

I launched DOSBox fullscreen and then played games for some time.
After a while I went to browse my APPS\ folder to see what I had
in here, and found my old copy of WordStar Professional 4.0.

And then, I started writing.

And the next day, and the next after it. I had found the distrac-
tion free environment that rested my mind I was looking for:
single-tasking operating system and WordStar.

Frankly I don't really know how to use WordStar. I know basic
keybindings but that's it. I like though that it 'beep' when you
reach the end of the line (at 65 columns), like a real typewriter
dinging to tell you that you have to do a carriage return. I know
this editor was designed to help stenographers make the transi-
tion from their mechanical machines to computers (hence the
beep), but you can actually feel it when you use it. I know too
that this editor can hard wrap and justify text automatically,
and have a help mechanism for hyphenation. And so much more. But
I don't want to use that. I prefer to do all this manually,
keeping an eye on the ruler at the top to know when I reach the
end of the line, or hearing the beep when I overtake on the
margin.

So, now, to write I have to:

  - power up,
  - log into TTY,
  - startx,
  - launch DOSBox (even if I could just put exec dosbox
    in .xinitrc)
  - go to C:\APPS\WORDSTAR\,
  - run WS.EXE,
  - type 'L' to change working directory where are my files
    (I don't know how to make WS keep this configuration)
  - type 'D' to create a new file,
  - enter the name of the new file,
  - write

So much for the simplicity...

But hey! I write!