I had some problems with Debian, mainly owing to me doing too minimal an initial install. So I backed out and came at it with Fedora, and that worked a little better. But I realized pretty quickly that my writing process is not “sit down to a completely clear writing surface and begin to type.”

When I write I am probably in a few browser tabs, looking up references, checking assumptions, etc. A lot of “ADHD-friendly” approaches assume that the primary attentional issue is one of distractibility. But writing is something of a refuge for me because it’s somewhere I can safely hyper focus: Even if I have ten tabs open as I write, those ten tabs are in service of writing something I am very, very focused on. I don’t find myself drifting around between distracting websites or doomscrolling. I am writing, which is something much more than just typing out words: It’s thinking, learning, examining, introspecting.

That reframed the question of “what is a writerdeck” for me.

The other issue with the “just go live in a tty” matter is that the typography isn’t great on the best day.

But I still like the idea of a machine you can’t do quite as much with. Something that, when you pick it up, is really only meant for one thing, and that is configured to direct you into that thing.

So rather than starting in a tmux session in a tty, I decided to allow X.org into the picture, but using i3 as the starting point.

I don’t really want a tiling wm, exactly. Something I learned from dialing in my tmux config is that I like to have one app on the screen at a time. i3 makes that possible.

My i3 config just opens me up into a fullscreen local ghostty on one workspace, a fullscreen ghostty ssh’d into my mini on the next, and a fullscreen browser with my custom startpage on the third. I can get to each with mod-1 through mod-3 and never really see the underlying wm or desktop, because I don’t really need or want to.

If I want a quick peek at battery status, date, time, etc. I can mod-f to let the i3 status bar peek through.

The donor machine, btw, is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (7th Gen). It’s got a Core i5 10th-gen CPU with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. You can get one at this spec or a gen later for under $300 if you look around. The hardware is very well understood by any modern Linux. The display is gorgeous.

I’m still tweaking the config a little bit. Once it feels a little more gelled I’ll put it in a gist.