couldn’t stand the kindle interface for books/notes
This is in comparison to using Emacs. When using Emacs as my interface for reading books and writing notes,
I can use a familiar UNIX file system to store my books as PDFs and EPUBs. I can easily back it up and interact with my collection using other tools I have (which is a real benefit of using a general purpose computing device). With the Kindle, creating and managing collections (an arbitrary category-based way of organizing your documents) is awkward enough (you need to select one book at a time and add it to a collection) given my experience with the last Kindle Scribe firmware that I just relied on the search bar to search for book titles.
When using Emacs, I can do a full text search of my notes file simply by pressing “s” (a keybind) and then typing a string. In contrast, while the notes written on the Scribe can be exported as PDFs, you don’t have the ability to search your notes. This wasn’t a dealbreaker for me, though, to be clear.
It is a bit hard to point at the things that make me want to use Emacs for it, because a load-bearing element is my desire to do everything in Emacs. Emacs has in-built documentation for its internals and almost every part of it is configurable—which means you can optimize your setup to be exactly as you like it. It feels like an extension of you, eventually.
This also somewhat drives my desire to use a simple and (eventually, given enough investment) understandable operating system that doesn’t shift beneath my feet. And given that both the interface and the operating system of the Kindle Scribe are opaque and (eventually) leaky abstractions, I feel less enthusiastic about investing my efforts into adapting myself to it.
This is in comparison to using Emacs. When using Emacs as my interface for reading books and writing notes,
I can use a familiar UNIX file system to store my books as PDFs and EPUBs. I can easily back it up and interact with my collection using other tools I have (which is a real benefit of using a general purpose computing device). With the Kindle, creating and managing collections (an arbitrary category-based way of organizing your documents) is awkward enough (you need to select one book at a time and add it to a collection) given my experience with the last Kindle Scribe firmware that I just relied on the search bar to search for book titles.
When using Emacs, I can do a full text search of my notes file simply by pressing “s” (a keybind) and then typing a string. In contrast, while the notes written on the Scribe can be exported as PDFs, you don’t have the ability to search your notes. This wasn’t a dealbreaker for me, though, to be clear.
It is a bit hard to point at the things that make me want to use Emacs for it, because a load-bearing element is my desire to do everything in Emacs. Emacs has in-built documentation for its internals and almost every part of it is configurable—which means you can optimize your setup to be exactly as you like it. It feels like an extension of you, eventually.
This also somewhat drives my desire to use a simple and (eventually, given enough investment) understandable operating system that doesn’t shift beneath my feet. And given that both the interface and the operating system of the Kindle Scribe are opaque and (eventually) leaky abstractions, I feel less enthusiastic about investing my efforts into adapting myself to it.