[john-titor]

I honestly don't see an added value to such a product. Pushing for minimalism can be nice in a lot of situations, but to me, this seems like it's going a bit too far: The target audience for such a product can't possibly be that large. Visual applications aside, even coding without any syntax highlighting does not sound too great.

[eequah9L]

A couple years ago I was toying with the idea of using an e-ink display instead of an active one. I wondered about the same thing, how is coding without syntax highlighting?

Not too bad it turns out. You still have bold, italic, underline and gray. You can do an inverse text, which is good for headers (e.g. magit sections). I guess with a GUI editor, you can do things like boxes around tokens etc. -- I'm in an emacs over ssh most of the time, so I haven't looked into that.

I actually ended up liking this and have been using it since then, on a LED display.

[dredmorbius]

As someone who'd adopted syntax highlighting somewhat grudgingly, it's something I do miss significantly whan it's gone.

That said, working on an e-ink device and doing mostly lightweight scripting occasionally, it's not a showstopper, and greyscale highlighting (which I've not looked into yet) could well work out.

I do remember when monochrome ANSI sequences were all I had on early serial terminals: regular, bold, underline, and reverse video. That's at least four gradations, and with a few greyscale shades, the palette should be usefully broad.

[outworlder]

> greyscale highlighting (which I've not looked into yet) could well work out.

It works nicely for books. Can't see why it wouldn't work for screens.

[dredmorbius]

It's mostly a matter of finding good presets to assign / a useful palette of syntax options and formatting.

Otherwise, yes, quite.

[chrismorgan]

A few years ago, I threw out Molokai and made a deliberately-minimal and high-contrast colour scheme that I named “bland”. For the first two weeks, it was strictly black (#000) on white (#fff), with keywords bold, comments italic, escape sequences in strings bold italic, and things like Rust attributes underlined. I was fairly confident I’d want a little colour, but I wanted to give strict black-and-white a fair trial period before introducing anything further. After this self-imposed moratorium I made strings red, comments green and number literals blue, and have since made a few tweaks (e.g. italics instead of underline for Rust attributes, italics for macro invocations, and orange for things like macro variables), and made a dark variant somewhere along the way, but this is what I use to this day and find to work very well. It’s also what I use on my website, though generally with a slightly grey background rather than white.

Now all this was for monospaced terminal and Vim use. I’d very much like to try it with the ability to use a proportional typeface, and especially in the context of a monospace environment, to experiment with mixing different faces (Triplicate + Equity).

Back to the monochrome thing: I’d like to be able to use grey in most or all of the places where I currently use colour, simply to distinguish them more clearly; it’d be a lighter grey than the luminosity channel of the corresponding colours. Give me that, and monochrome is quite sufficient. But really, even black-and-white was tolerable, though it’d lend significant difficulty for some features line diff highlighting. Certainly full colour is nowhere near as necessary as most imagine (commonly often never having experienced anything else).

[diffeomorphism]

When discussing external eink screens the comments were that you definitely do get syntax highlighting, just not in color but rather bold, italic, different font etc.

That said, I also think that an eink screen (or tablet with screen) that you can use with any laptop has a much larger audience than having it built in.

[JKCalhoun]

Interesting. I cded without syntax highlighting for three decades. I think I could go back in an instant as I still haven't got comfortable with modern code editors. Visual Studio Code (as an example) has so much going on that I often can't tell if a word is high-lit because it's in my search field, I have selected it, or some other reason.

[dmos62]

> syntax highlighting [on a monochrome eink]

I'm not sure how many tones this eink screen has, but there certainly is a variety of monochrome editor themes. You could make your own if not.

[dredmorbius]

The Onyx BOOX Max Lumi features 16 greyscale shades, with more available via dithering and/or halftoning, which is mostly tolerable on text, given 220 dpi resolution.

[daptaq]

Perhaps battery-life?

[osener]

I would LOVE to have this for working outdoors on a sunny day.

[DoingIsLearning]

I would much rather see a comeback of those Transflective LCD displays that Pixel Qi made almost 10 years ago.

Here is a demo of the Pixel Qi10 display : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi6DbFyZde8

They had a dual mode so you could have the look/feel of a normal backlight LCD panel but when you wanted to go outside you could toggle to transflective mode.

This means you would have normal refresh rates, color, multimedia, and an actual useful display when outdoors.

Not sure why they ever went bust or what happened to the IP for these displays.

[dredmorbius]

With frontlighting, e-ink is similarly useful indoors or out. Alternatively, you could have an LED booklight or similar to illuminate the screen.

Refresh rates on e-ink are more than sufficient for text, and suffice for getting a general sense of video, though I wouldn't call that a high-level experience.

Scrolling and similar are a bit rough, though the general solution is to avoid doing that, and instead navigate through pagination --- a full page (or portion) at a time.

[DoingIsLearning]

> e-ink are more than sufficient for text, and suffice for getting a general sense of video

Hard disagree but I understand this is personal and that perceived experience will vary across the board.

[dredmorbius]

I'm curious how you find e-ink insufficient / unsuited to text specifically.

[DoingIsLearning]

You left out the rest of the sentence :) ... E-ink is not the medium for getting a sense of a video, also at least for wrinting tasks more than reading, smooth scrolling is a much needed feature to not get disoriented.

I agree that e-ink is great for _reading_ text which is why it is used in e-readers.

[vim-guru]

This!