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The problem

Unfortunately, I don't love keeping up with that paper. Across many different classes, even with dedicated folders for each one, something important inevitably gets lost. Notebooks are also bulky and can take up a lot of space. I tried bullet journalling for about a month earlier this year and, while the process was enjoyable, the maintenance was not. My brain moves faster than my pen (even though I have terrible handwriting) and I inevitably forget letters or even whole words. This is a problem while writing in pen because white-out looks ugly and I dislike wasting whole pages because of a couple mistakes.

The obvious solution here is to get an iPad with an Apple Pen, right? Right??

Wrong because Apple bad.¹

The solution

Enter the world of ... what are they even called? E-ink notebooks? Paper tablets? E-R/W?² Do they even have a "device category" yet? I don't know, but they solve my problem in a wonderful way.

As the names suggest, these are devices that can usually open and read e-books (EPUBs, PDFs, etc.), annotate them, and create standalone pages of notes as if they were full notebooks. The most well-known of these devices is likely the reMarkable. They had a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign and produced the reMarkable 1, followed by the reMarkable 2 in 2020. There are a few devices like these by now but we'll look at the reMarkable first.

The reMarkable

This device boasts all of the features I was looking for. It renders digital content, from books and manuals to comics and manga, allows you to mark those documents up as you would if they were physical media, create full notebooks of hand written text, organise them, search, and, if your handwriting is legible enough (mine certainly is not), perform OCR on your notes and email a transcription to yourself. It even runs Linux and the developers have opened SSH up so you can remote in and tinker with it as much as you like. Because of this, there's a pretty awesome community of people creating third-party tools and integrations that add even further functionality. My favourite is probably rMview, a really fast VNC client for the reMarkable that allows you to view your device's screen on any computer.

After watching all of MyDeepGuide's extensive playlist on the reMarkable, however, I decided to go with a different product.

Enter the Supernote A5X

The Supernote A5X has all of the basic features the reMarkable has: reading documents, writing notes, and organising your content. Its implementation, on the other hand, seems to be much more polished. It also lacks some features from the reMarkable while adding others.

Operating System

While the reMarkable runs Codex,³ a "custom Linux-based OS optimised for low-latency e-paper", the Supernote just runs Android. There are both benefits and detriments to this; on one hand, they're running all of Android, bloated that it is, on a very lightweight tablet. On the other, they don't have to develop and maintain a custom operating system. This allows them to focus on other aspects that are arguably more important so I don't actually mind that it runs Android.

The only place that Android stands out is in system operations; file transfer uses MTP and, when you swipe down from the top of the device, a small bar appears similar to what was in early Android. This lets you change WiFi networks, sync with the Supernote Cloud, take a screenshot, search, and access the system settings. Nothing else about the device really screams Android to me.

Community

I don't usually browse Reddit but the Supernote community there is fascinating. I haven't looked around enough to know exactly what his relationship is with the company, but one of the members, u/hex2asc, seems to represent Supernote in something of an official capacity. He's incredibly active and usually responds to posts and questions within a day or two.

Before I purchased a Supernote, I wrote a post asking about a couple of things that concerned me: sync targets, open document formats, and cross-note links. I don't really plan to write full documents on the device but having the option to do so would still be nice. The other features are absolutely killer for me as I would like to maintain a Zettelkasten (I wrote about using Vim to do so last year but didn't end up sticking with it) and manage document synchronisation with my own Nextcloud server. The community was quick to respond and confirm that Zettelkasten functionality would be implemented soon™. u/hex2asc responded the day after and said that WebDAV would be supported but not earlier than May (September update: it's still not supported), ODF would likely not be supported, and cross-note links were definitely a possibility. Another community member has been avidly following the subreddit and even put together an unofficial roadmap.

Interfaces

Home & Organisation

TODO Record very short video about home/organisation

Settings

TODO Record very short video about settings

Writing & Annotating

The following images are screenshots of the full page above with the possible UI variations while reading a book. This first one is default, with the editing bar at the top. It is exactly the same as what's displayed on the blank pages for hand writing full notes. From left to right is the Table of Contents toggle, the pen tools (fineliner, "fountain" pen,⁴ and highlighter), the erasers, lasso select tool, undo/redo, context menu, palm rejection toggle, previous page, goto page, next page, and exit.

{{< figure src="~/repos/sites/secluded/static/assets/pngs/supernote-reader-default.png" >}}

You can hold your finger on that bar and drag it down to detach it from the top. The default width exposes all the tools without whitespace. You can move it around the screen by dragging the circle with a straight line through the middle on the far left.

{{< figure src="~/repos/sites/secluded/static/assets/pngs/supernote-reader-medium.png" >}}

If you tap that circle, the width shrinks and everything except the pens, erasers, and undo/redo buttons are hidden. It can be dragged the same was as in the previous image and tapping that circle will expand the bar again.

{{< figure src="~/repos/sites/secluded/static/assets/pngs/supernote-reader-small.png" >}}

The last mode is with the bar completely hidden. You achieve this just by dragging it to the right edge of the screen. Once hidden, you can swipe right to left from the edge and it will be revealed flush with the right edge.

{{< figure src="~/repos/sites/secluded/static/assets/pngs/supernote-reader-minimal.png" >}}

Experience

Reading content

I love e-ink. I think it looks beautiful and would love to have an e-ink monitor.⁵ That said, the Supernote has an especially nice display with 226 PPI (pixels per inch). The image below was taken with my phone's camera so it's not very good. However, if you zoom in a bit, you can see that the curved edges of some letters are slightly pixellated. Viewing with my naked eye at a comfortable distance, it does look better to me than some of my print books, however.

{{< figure src="~/repos/sites/secluded/static/assets/pngs/supernote-resolution.png" >}}

At the moment, I am pretty disappointed with Table of Contents detection for ePUBs. A great many of my books seem to use a legacy ToC format that the Supernote sees and tries/fails to read before attempting to read the more up-to-date one. This is easily remedied by editing the ePUB in Calibre, going to Tools → Upgrade Book Internals → Remove the legacy Table of Contents in NCX format. You might need to make a small change to one of the HTML files and revert it before the save button is enabled. After that, just copy it back over to the Supernote and everything should work properly.

Writing notes

I write notes as often if not more often than I read and annotate books. It's the main reason I purchased the device and I love the experience. The Supernote doesn't really feel like paper despite what their marketing materials claim, though it doesn't feel bad either. It's hard to describe but I would say it's something like writing with a rollerball pen on high-quality paper with a marble counter underneath: incredibly smooth with but a little bit of texture so it doesn't feel like writing on a glass display.

While writing latency⁶ is noticeable, I really don't have a huge issue with it. I write very quickly but find that the slight latency actually makes writing more enjoyable. It sounds weird and I'm not sure why, but I really like writing on the Supernote; it's wonderfully smooth, pressure-sensitive, the latency makes things interesting, and the Heart of Metal pen feels good in my hand.

Surfacing Content

While organisation is done using a regular filesystem hierarchy, the Supernote does have other ways to search for and surface your notes. As you're writing, you can use the lasso select tool and encircle a word. A little dialogue pops up and gives you a few buttons for things you can do with that selection: copy, move to another page, cut, add it to the Table of Contents, or mark it as a key word. If you select the key word icon, the Supernote does some incredible OCR⁷ on it and displays a dialogue where you can add it to the note file as a tag. This dialogue allows you to edit the word before adding it just in case the OCR was wonky. Even with my terrible handwriting, I've found that it works very well and I rarely have to make edits.

TODO Ping Isi and Volpeon when finished

I dislike Apple's operating system, their hardware, business model, privacy practises, and much of what they stand for as a company. Don't @ me. ↩︎
E-R/W is a play on media commonly being labelled as R/W when you can read from it and write to it. ↩︎
Taken from their support page about the reMarkable 2; search the page for operating system and it should show up. ↩︎
It's not really a fountain pen even though that's what they call it; it's just pressure-sensitive. ↩︎
There does seem to be a group of people interested in just such a thing: Challenges Building an Open-Source E Ink Laptop ↩︎
In this situation, latency refers to how long it takes for "ink" to show up on the "page" after writing something. ↩︎
Optical Character Recognition: the program looks at your handwriting and tries to turn it into text. ↩︎

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