# Getting a Freewrite Alpha // 24-6-24 Some weeks ago, I noticed getfreewrite.com and their products through a bulletin post by another sundog, and after a week's consideration, I decided to order a Freewrite Alpha. It seems rather expensive, and I've read various critiques about the cheap plastic feeling and the loud keyboard, but I decided I'd still give it a try. Distraction-free writing is an appealing idea, and I've got quite useful solutions for that already. I'm typing this in ed(1) running on Termux on my old Android phone, an IMHO ed is the ideal editor for "writing ahead": it allows you to do everything you'll ever need in producing and editing text, but its modal design puts a small barrier to switching from writing to editing (i.e fiddling around in the text). But of course a touchscreen is no real keyboard. I've got a Bluetooth keyboard that works well with this phone (as well as with my tablet), but hooking it up costs small time&effort which kills it for short occasions of free time. Better from the viewpoint of keyboard quality would be my old Acer AspireOne running FreeBSD (and obviously ed), but it doesn't work well with sleep mode, and booting takes a minute which again is too long for quuck runs. The Freewrite devices come quite close to my needs, although they have a "walled-garden vibe" with their direct links to online tools and services (which are artificially restricted). But getting texts out through USB should work as well, and so they should remain usable even without their dedicated cloud thingies. I opted for an Alpha, because the foldable Traveller smells "hinge mechanics trouble", and the Smart devices are even larger than the AspireOne and are therefore less practical on the go. It should arrive in a day or two, and I'll follow up with reports of my experiences. --- ## update 24-6-28 I just received the Freewrite Alpha today! There was a small moment of worry, after having it connected to my WiFi and it told me there is no firmware update available, which of course was wrong. However, after some retries it worked, and without further hitches. So here I am, giving the keyboard a first try. The sound, which was reported as being too loud, is rather pleasing to me; I don't think this is a device you should use while your loved one is sleeping next to you, anyway! Only the space bar has a bit too much of "clackiness", but it's probably not louder than other normal keyboards. And the tactile feedback is delicious, in my opinion. Navigation in the draft is working well, although with the peculiarity of the cursor being controlled by `new` and the keys `ASDW` which smells like gamer spirit. Being a "vi person" (using the editor vi on Unix), I would have preferred the `HJKL` keys, but it's a detail. Editing this way works remarkably well, which is a risk concerning the "forward-writing" philosophy. However, there are two minor issues: Sometimes, jumping around in the text results in the logical cursor position getting out of sync with the display. A possible symptom is the cursor seeming to be stuck in a word and you cannot move it further towards the end, but logically it *is* already at the end of the entire text. To correct for this, one can press `pg up/dn` to force an update of the display and recalculation of the cursor position. (This only happened once so far, though.) Second, the `new` key doesn't get repeated when the cursor keys `ASDW` are continuously pressed, i.e the cursor stops moving and instead starts adding letters at the current position. This means you cannot use the cursor keys with long pressing; you have to repeatedly hit the corresponding key. Synchronizing the text via WiFi into postbox.getfreewrite.com so far worked smoothly, and also sending the draft directly to my e-mail address. Of course this all depends on getfreewrite's cloud services, which gives me bad feelings, but as it's not the only way of getting the drafts out, it's acceptable, and obviously rather comfortable. (There is a small issue if you use different WLANs, though: apparently the device can only store one network, and you have to re-enter their passwords, when you switch them.) The second way of getting drafts out of the device is by hooking it up to a computer by USB cable. This works well also on a Unix system. The data shows up as mass storage with a flat directory, each draft being a `*.txt` file, the name composed of the 31 first letters of the text, same as in the draft list on the device itself. Although the "drive" seems to be writable, nothing shows up on the device after disconnecting, so it apparently just emulates the drive for reading. Contrary to what the Alpha's manual claims, there is no README file visible on the drive. The drive capacity was reported as being 2 MB only (mounted on a FreeBSD system), which seems tiny nowadays. But as the device is meant to be used for drafting but not editing, the corresponding approximately 300 thousand words should be plenty: with my current speed, I would need about 20 days of continuous 8 hours of typing to produce them... And who knows, it might just be an artefact of the storage emulation and not the real capacity of the device? The "on-the-go" feeling is for sure nice: just taking the device out and being able to continue after 1 sec of switching it on is super convenient. I might have to think about a cover for protection, though. I haven't written a ton of text yet (at least this post though!) but after a day of use I'm quite convinced the money invested was not completely wasted. ^-^ PS: Obviously editing was done on a Unix system with ed, but I allowed myself to transfer the draft via the builtin (cloud-based) e-mail feature. --- ## update 24-6-29 I sent some suggestions to the Freewrite folks, and was pleasantly surprised that they acknowledged reception less than a day later. Here's the content part of that message: - Add damper material under the Space bar: its sound is much darker and more pronounced than that of the other keys (which sound really nice, in my opinion). - Flatten/recede the power button, to reduce the probability of inadvertent powering-up of the device. - Add a flap over the display (similar construction as for the stand on the backside), made of translucent material: it would serve as a protection for the display during transport, as shield from onlookers, and as diffusor of direct sunlight or other point-like sources (reducing shadowing effects of the LCD). - Add alternatives for cursor keys: also `HJKL` in addition to `ASWD` to cater to the "muscle memory" of people familiar with the vi editor family. - Add cursor keys for jumping to the beginning/end of the text: `new` + `[` / `]` or `new` + `Q` / `E` for example. - Make the `new` key also sticky: with the current version, when you keep it pressed together with one of the cursor keys, it doesn't repeat and so you add a string of letters instead of continuously move the cursor. You have to repeatedly hit the letter/cursor key to keep moving, which stresses the key unnecessarily. - Enlarge the cursor, perhaps by making it two pixel high instead of only one: would increase visibility especially when editing. - Use text only up to the first dot for generating the file name during export, instead of always the first 31 characters: dots are a bad idea in file names anyway, and this would allow to better control name generation. ### update 24-8-10 Recently there was a firmware update released (ver.1.20.0), and this fixes the issue with the non-sticky `new` key in combination with the cursor keys `ASWD` -- i.e repetition now works. But there now seems to be a problem with word counting (displayed when long pressing the space bar), which often simply doesn't work. OTOH, the Alpha now permits the use of different keyboard layouts for better access of non-ASCII characters. Unfortunately (at least in my opinion) this removed the possibility of entering non-ASCII characters also from the US-ASCII layout with the `alt gr` key (which now seems to be simply inactive in that layout). I don't really like such uncontrollable changes, honestly...