My ex-colleague and old friend Watts Martin has an interesting post about BYOK. BYOK is a “writer deck”, a device exclusively for writing that has no distracting apps or even a connection to the Internet. The idea is that writers can’t get distracted when they reach a temporary block by escaping to social media or something similar; they have to push through the block and get on with their writing.
According to Martin, BYOK is better than most devices in its class but there are still problems. He doesn’t like the available fonts and the screen—as you can see from the picture in his post—is pretty small, about 6 lines depending on the font. That seems to me to amount to a rather uncomfortable working environment. Fortunately, I don’t usually find myself distracted when I’m writing.
Then there’s the matter of research. Very often you need to look something up when you’re writing and you can’t do that with something like BYOK so you need to switch devices, pulling you even further out of the flow. And as Martin observes, it’s not easy to integrate your notes either.
The deal buster for me, though, is the builtin editor. It’s not Emacs based and doesn’t even support Emacs keybindings for navigation. As I’ve repeatedly said—as recently as yesterday—I simply can’t comfortably write outside of Emacs anymore. Martin is a relative newcomer to Emacs but he’s already feeling the discomfort. Once the Emacs way sets in, he’ll be just like me and won’t consider doing serious writing outside of Emacs.
Even if I were subject to being distracted by the greater Internet, I would simply turn off my WiFi to produce what is effectively an Emacs based writer deck. One thing for sure, I’m not giving up Emacs and suffering a second rate writing environment.