Some More Riffing on PDAs and TUIs

2021-11-25

I use a Palm PDA daily. I do my computer tasks and recreation in a terminal most of the time and really like TUIs for their simplicity, efficiency and predictability. Those are some of the same reasons I am a fan of Palm PDAs and its software. They do the thing they set out to with almost no cruft. Some ideas are floating around in my head around a mashing together of these two things.

For the last few weeks I have switched my Pinephone OS over to SXMO which utilizes a very simple and lightweight interface based on sway, bemenu and an assortment of shell scripts and terminal applications primarily. Some touch screen gestures make it possible to launch and do some basic navigation in terminal programs, on a pocketable touchscreen linux computer. That's pretty neat by itself but it got me to thinking about how the Pinephone running a minimal primarily terminal based UI and carefully selected terminal apps could be molded into a pretty snazzy modern day PDA.

There are lots of details that would need to be hashed out to even begin approaching an environment as polished as something like Palm OS but I think the potential is there. This concept is also about to get even more plausible with the impending release of the Pinephone keyboard turning it into something reminiscent of the old Psion palmtop PDAs. Some things I would ideally like to tweak about the Pinephone to make it more PDA-like would be underclocking the CPU and doing whatever else is possible to reduce the power consumption to the lowest possible level that still provides an acceptable experience. The Pinephone's kill switches could be useful for completely disconnecting any parts not necessary for the use case. This would hopefully have a little bit of positive effect on battery life as well as privacy.

Ideally some sort of TUI launcher interface to tie various things together into a more friendly UI would be nice. Having the option of doing certain more advanced tasks or using the built in networking in certain situations might be nice to have but being offline is something I like about PDAs personally. With the option of putting a large and cheap micro SD in it for storage, having decent speakers/headphone jack and a nice display makes it have a good potential as an offline video and music player. That is one thing that I think would be a worthwhile use of the more modern internals.

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