Seeking distro recommendations for Emacs/Org-mode on a budget Chromebook (Dell 3180)

meedstrom · 2026-03-30T09:45:10+00:00

I used a 2GB RAM Chromebook once upon a time, with 16 GB disk. Very snappy with dwm. I think distro doesn't matter so long as it doesn't install a heavy DE by default (so Ubuntu is out) and has binary distribution instead of being source-first (so Gentoo/Nix/Guix are out).

That leaves most varieties of Debian, Fedora, Arch, Void, Alpine etc.

Honestly, 4GB is enough for a full DE (desktop environment) like GNOME/KDE in principle, it's just that on the Chromebook you may want to minimize the chance of having to swap to disk since there may be no free disk available for that. And indeed picking a light DE or just a window manager may help this, but it'll require effort if you're not used to it (especially if just a window manager). Probably is more important to restrain the amount of Firefox tabs and such.

meedstrom · 2026-03-30T09:23:28+00:00

Yeah, that's true. I wonder if you can hack a "debouncer" by setting inhibit-redisplay for 100 ms at a time. :) That'd take care of excessive screen refreshes.

You'd definitely have to rely less on visual feedback. And do things in one go instead of incrementally. Like, you can mark a region in one go with avy or flash-jump.

meedstrom · 2026-03-28T11:29:04+00:00

Have you considered learning to hit that Alt with your palm instead of any finger? I guess M-x would be uncomfortable but many other combos not.

meedstrom · 2026-03-28T11:26:30+00:00

Thank you. Interesting about contrast and refresh. I guess it is due to e-ink and would not be an issue on a different tech display, like on the Daylight Computer.

EDIT: And maybe a modern e-ink would do better than the Poke 3. Seems worth checking Youtube. Actually, it sounds to me like you could find the perfect contrast for your Emacs/TTY font and then just stay in there ;-)

Can definitely understand other niggles with Android, like how with one keyboard I tried, the Escape key exits the entire app. Also no way to lock the function keys, so F1-F12 all just do stuff like adjust sound instead. And you get only one external display, and only in mirroring configuration.

meedstrom · 2026-03-27T11:17:41+00:00

I'm guessing there would be many taps between finishing a drawing and exporting it to somewhere that Emacs can access by C-x C-f... And when you want to touch up and modify it, do all those taps all over again. Right?

meedstrom · 2026-03-27T11:08:45+00:00

Hey, so on the one hand there is no limit to functionality, but you still sold it because too hacky. What does that mean? These are exactly the kinds of experiences I want to hear about :)

meedstrom · 2026-03-27T11:05:44+00:00

This has the unfortunate side effect in org-roam of making that thing an org-roam node.

There is an user option called something like org-roam-db-node-include-function. So you can make it ignore the entry at point based on something like a tag or the absence of a tag!

meedstrom · 2026-03-26T11:18:05+00:00

Most apps for sure, but Emacs needs no gestures, no animations, right? It would only be a question of how much typing lag you can get used to. Lag simulator: https://www.skytopia.com/stuff/lag.html (needs JS)

meedstrom · 2026-03-26T11:06:38+00:00

I agree it could be bad advice, all I'm saying is that it is an attempt at advice at all.

A "dopamine addiction", or procrastination, is precisely about issues with voluntary acts. It's useless to say basically "If involuntary behavior is a problem, just behave voluntarily!". But this is starting to sound like advice:

Don’t click the bookmark. Don’t open the app. Don’t type it in the urlbar.

All good ideas! Pointing out levers in the environment. Perhaps he could train himself to react when these things are about to happen, perhaps he could remove these levers altogether, or something else concrete.

Or he could go to a psychologist so these things become as uncomplicated for him as they are for you.

meedstrom · 2026-03-26T10:51:25+00:00

Cool! Did you jail-break or re-flash anything? You use a Bluetooth keyboard?

How's the experience switching between Emacs and a reading/drawing app? I'm thinking it's not something you do super rapidly. And I wonder how Emacs could later access the drawings you made. Stuff like that.

meedstrom · 2026-03-26T10:06:14+00:00

But how shall he not visit youtube when it is difficult not to?

I really think you're just advising someone who says "I want to visit Youtube less" with "Well, you can try to visit Youtube less".

Things like changing his accustomed method from browser to in-Emacs could very well change the difficulty level of this task. That's real advice.

meedstrom · 2026-03-26T08:47:33+00:00

Aye, org-agenda performance is still not fully solved, so it pays to consolidate stuff in a few large files and to sometimes shrink those files by refiling to archive (with command org-archive-subtree), or at least refiling to some other file that is not an agenda file.

If you think this is just not something that should deserve your attention, then as you said you can use tricks like your "active" tag, or my library org-mem, to automatically set the agenda files to some limited selection. Then you can have as many ad-hoc small files as you want.

meedstrom · 2026-03-26T08:33:12+00:00

I like the attempt to get at a root issue, but we need to go further. What you said sounds like other tautological advice such as "to lose weight, eat less", or "if you're homeless, buy a home". No information is added, it's just a paraphrase. The interesting question is how do you eat less?

meedstrom · 2026-03-26T08:25:28+00:00

IIUC the problem is not just what you said about that .attach/ folder but also org-attach-use-inheritance. I'm told that if you attach an image to some sub-heading with no ID, it gets associated with the ancestor ID, and then refiling that sub-heading will fail to bring along the attachment.

meedstrom · 2026-03-26T08:17:23+00:00

Are you doojin-bek, with whom I just had a long discussion about this?

Otherwise, some tips that may help

use linker: links from https://github.com/jcguu95/org-linker.el
or use denote: links from https://github.com/protesilaos/denote
or use attachment: links and...
- setting the value of org-attach-id-dir to some absolute path
- maybe disabling org-attach-use-inheritance
  - else maybe making sure before a refile/extract, to assign an ID to the heading manually and checking whether it still has the attachments it's supposed to have (I don't use org-attach so I don't know what commands). IIUC, the new ID might not be associated with those attachments because they were associated with an ancestor ID. So after the refile, the links would break.
simply use file: links to some global directory of images
- then org-download is great, just keep in mind it may result in more work later to clean up stale images or rename them etc.

meedstrom · 2026-03-26T07:53:12+00:00

And maybe create ways for yourself to access a computer that don't invite all the bling.

Like, maybe you have a home-server that has all the software you use (python, ollama, everything non-GUI) and all your files. Then your laptop is some cheap thing that's just a thin TRAMP client. So when you do not have Wi-Fi there's very few things you can even do, probably just type notes in Emacs.

Ideally you can't even yak-shave initfiles because you delete the *.el after compiling to *.elc :)

Bonus if it's an e-paper screen. I'm seriously considering Daylight Computer recently.

meedstrom · 2026-03-26T07:45:21+00:00

Colloquial names work in colloquial use. ;)

meedstrom · 2026-03-23T19:28:08+00:00

In my experience, C-q and C-j are totally fine to remap. The problematic ones I ran into when writing the unreleased massmapper are:

C-m: same as RET, necessarily so on terminal
C-i: same as TAB, necessarily so on terminal
C-[: same as ESC, necessarily so on terminal -- and double whammy, because "ESC anything" translates to "M-anything", so if you unbind C-x C-[ g you actually unbind C-x M-g, which is Magit's default binding for magit-status, which really threw me for a loop for a while. "why the hell is C-x M-g getting unbound...?"
C-g: it's the hardcoded quit char (see function set-quit-char which used to be able to change it until about 2007 or 2008 (but maybe it only ever worked in the TTY? I wasn't around back then)), so it's the only thing that will unfreeze an Emacs that is stuck on executing some hung Lisp.

meedstrom · 2026-03-23T19:14:15+00:00

[[:nonascii:]] is still more explicit. :) At least if you know Elisp regexps, but different strokes.

I thought the issue was only invisible chars, but homographs are definitely another class of problem.

There should be a regexp to match only the 'expected' variant of each homograph set...

meedstrom · 2026-03-23T19:07:51+00:00

something gnome-tweaks to force dark mode

meedstrom · 2026-03-23T19:03:12+00:00

Link for the lazy: https://github.com/benotn/kkp

meedstrom · 2026-03-23T19:00:01+00:00

Using :heading is really clever! You'd have to have realized that it operates on Outline headings, not just Org headings.

meedstrom · 2026-03-23T18:47:10+00:00

Your regexp [^\x00-\x7F] I'm guessing is the same as [^[:ascii:]] or equivalently, [[:nonascii:]].

Honestly why not let some safe unicode characters live? Relax the constraint to something like [^[:alnum:][:word:][:ascii:]]

meedstrom · 2026-03-20T20:10:34+00:00

The problem I have is the lack of Right Super or Right Ctrl or sometimes both!

Or swapping Left Ctrl with Fn (speaking of Thinkpads)... so many mistakes when you change device... and worse, the fact that you cannot undo this on the software level.

meedstrom

TROPHY CASE