It's time to talk about my writerdeck
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tldr:
I installed console-only Debian on an old laptop (no desktop OS at all)
I added some packages to make it work better for writing:
network-manager for connecting to hotspots while I'm away
kmscon for custom fonts and more than 16 colors in the tty
tmux for a nice status bar and rudimentary screen tiling, as well as acpi and light for battery and backlight details, respectfully
neovim as my editor and vim-vimwiki to give myself a personal wiki
syncthing to sync and backup my work
I have an attention problem.<br>A couple of weeks ago, I decided to convert my old laptop into a writerdeck, a dedicated writing device free from the distractions of the modern internet.<br>Lots of folks build really elaborate offline devices for this, and I'd love to do that... someday. Right now I have no shortage of projects and the point is to get writing, so I used what I had: a six-year-old laptop which still runs great, has plenty of power, but isn't getting much use anymore.<br>Crucially, this laptop has an excellent keyboard, and a matte screen, which makes it awesome to type on for long stretches, and functional enough in the daylight (I like to sit outside with my dog and write). It's also a System76 Galago Pro (not sponsored), which means it's already Linux friendly and has great support in the kernel.<br>Setting up a tty instead of a desktop<br>Now, you could certainly just use a regular desktop OS and keep it offline, although that's easier said than done. I don't think you can fully remove the browsers from a modern Mac or Windows PC. At least not in a supported way.<br>Of course, I'm a Linux user, and I have any number of options. I could have gone with a simple desktop or window manager and just not installed a browser, but I wanted something that really broke the desktop OS muscle memory and forced me into thinking about my words with intention.<br>I opted for a tty-based setup, using Debian (Trixie at the time of writing). Console only- no x11 or Wayland, no desktop getting in my way.<br>Installing Debian is easy enough. I use the text-based installer mode, and for this writerdeck, I opted to skip full-disk encryption (there's nothing on this device that isn't going to be public anyway).<br>Folks always tell me they get hung up on things because they don't set themselves up with sudo on Debian. If you're coming from Mint or Ubuntu or virtually any other desktop-oriented distro, this could trip you up. If you want to use sudo for admin tasks, skip adding a root password. That'll disable root and set you up as a sudo user.<br>Leave this blank if you want to use a sudo user! A lot of folks don't know about this quirk and get into trouble if they're coming from other distros.On the desktop setup screen, I chose to remove all desktop features, because again, I want this thing to be a minimal device. Just me and the words, no GUI getting in my way.<br>I removed the selection for "Debian desktop environment" and "GNOME" here. This way it's just a tty.When things wrap up, you'll be greeted with a bland console login. Perfect place to get started.<br>It's boring. Perfect.Installing network-manager<br>After signing in for the first time and making sure I was up-to-date with a quick sudo apt update and a sudo apt upgrade, I chose to replace the regular network stack with the network-manager package. Mainly to get access to the very good curses tool nm-tui for connecting to networks.<br>nm-tui is a thousand times easier than editing config files for setting up network devices. And while I will be working mostly offline with this device when I'm away from home, I do appreciate the ability to connect it to the network to back up files should the need arise.<br>After installing network-manager with sudo apt install network-manager, you can use nm-tui to scan for available Wi-Fi networks and get hooked up. Depending on your hardware, you might also have WAN access here. Pretty cool.<br>Having a TUI for networking is a nice quality-of-life improvement. Installing neovim and kmscon<br>I couldn't wait any longer, I installed neovim as soon as I could with sudo apt install neovim. I didn't want to edit with nano. Nothing personal, I'm just a vim user all the way now.<br>Normally I use traditional vim but I opted for neovim as I'm trying to get to know it a bit more.<br>Then, I installed kmscon, which for Debian Trixie needed to be added from backports.<br>First, I updated my Debian source list by editing the file at /etc/apt/sources.list to add the following two lines:<br>deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware<br>deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmwareA quick sudo apt update and then I can simply run sudo apt install -t trixie-backports kmscon. This will install the kmscon package from backports, as well as its dependencies, and set it to automatically start on boot. Next reboot, you'll see the familiar tty, but now it's...