Originally published at: PiWrite: use a Kindle as a text editor | Boing Boing
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I am forever enchanted by minimal writing environments until I managed to catch-the-bus and start writing on one of them. It turns out I mouse extensively when writing – not just cursor movement, but dragging and re-ordering and so on. It’s essential at a sentence construction level.
Which I hadn’t noticed until I started trying to write on a potato-based PC tethered to a typewriter and a tractor.
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well, heck. i use a dry erase board and a scanner
if you splurge on a two sided board, you don’t have to worry about latency. write on the back side of the board as you wait for the scan
distraction fee writing at its best 
It’s really pretty simple to convert a Kindle into a writing tool. I used a blue tooth keyboard and WPS Office which I downloaded, and I emailed the resulting document files to myself for later editing. Worked really well when I was on vacation and didn’t want to carry a heavier laptop.
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quick note @EylerWerve: I misread your comment, thought you were currently suffering from tool-selection troubles, and I misunderstood this whole thing. I now see you said you past-tense “managed to catch-the-bus and start writing” so disregard this! But I feel like it’s probably worth sharing anyway.
I’m hesitant to leave this reply because I know exactly where you’re coming from, so I understand that suggesting you learn yet another tool might be making the problem worse. But if you’re not going to start writing right away anyway (
), learning a vi-style editor could be very worthwhile. It’s a really efficient way to do not just writing but text editing without touching your mouse (for example: select the entire sentence your cursor is on by typing vis!), and it’s small enough that it’s included as a standard part of a lot of hacker-y projects, kind of like what we see in the original post. (Not to mention noted hacker tool “MacOS.”)
Even if you’re not going to use an actual vi editor for writing (and, honestly, there’s good reasons to steer clear), a good chunk of GUI-based open source writing applications will include a vi-compatible shortcuts mode you can switch on to use these really efficient keystrokes to navigate and edit your text, without giving up the other conveniences that come along with 21st-century tools.
TL;DR: sorry, here’s one more
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I dunno. PiWrite sounds like fools gold to me.
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It took four more peripherals and an emulator, but eventually I saw what you did there.
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