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A quick update on my experiments with distraction-free computing (as outlined in my previous post). I hacked together a super simple cyberdeck, which I'm defining as a DIY, portable, keyboard-driven terminal. I wanted something I could play with ASAP with minimal fuss, so I made a simple base plate with retaining clips to hold my Raspberry Pi keyboard and Raspberry Pi tablet in a fixed laptop-like configuration, so that it's usable on my lap. I'm calling it the DFPi (distraction-free Pi).
As you'll notice there's no mouse or trackpad (which makes the whole thing more compact), although the screen is a touch screen. It is powered by an external powerbank, although I can clip the powerbank onto the back of the screen if I want more portability. If I had to build it from scratch, I would do it differently - I'd use a Raspberry Pi 400 (keyboard with built-in Pi) with a hinged 7" HDMI screen. This would look something like a netbook, but more compact because there's no need for a trackpad.
I've spent much of January configuring and testing various ideas on the DFPi. In the spirit of "distraction-free", I decided to focus on one-app-at-a-time, with a preference for console apps. I enjoyed reading through Cadence's recent posts about command line, since I'd just gone through the same joys and difficulties myself:
gemini://cadence.moe/gemlog/2022-01-29-command-line-computing-difficulties.bliz
My main difficulties are that each TUI app uses it's own keybinding (which is especially frustrating when moving between amfora, lynx, elinks, w3m, etc). Another major frustration is that I haven't yet figured out how to manage file associations, e.g. if in "nnn" (my file explorer of choice) I select an image or video file, it opens it in links as garbled text, but in amfora/w3m/etc they don't know what to do with the file.
Something I noticed was that being "offline" (as in, not connected to the internet while I'm using the DFPi) wasn't of any noticable benefit, once I'd already restricted myself to single-tasking and using console apps. Even things like copy-and-paste was often (but not always) an indication that I was getting distracted, because I was obviously trying to switch between apps, and maybe I should just focus on one. As Cadence mentioned in their post, copy-and-paste doesn't just work out-of-the-box and I found that this adds the necessary friction to multi-tasking for me.
Here are some software and configurations I found useful/interesting so far:
After the novelty of mucking about with the DFPi, I'm currently using it mainly for:
Tags: #distractionfree #raspberrypi #cyberdeck #offline #terminal #console #commandline #tui #dfpi
