Edsger
A handwritten Clojure REPL for the reMarkable 2
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HN · launched Jun 2, 2026 · 264 upvotes (top 2%) · 1 view
Niche: programming languages and interpreters · 161 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -75% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 161 launches in programming languages and interpreters →
Could you build this?
No Building an on-device handwritten Clojure REPL for the reMarkable 2 requires reverse-engineering proprietary e-ink hardware framebuffers, custom Linux OS hacks, and real-time offline handwriting recognition integrated with a Clojure interpreter.
What it would actually take: The application requires writing custom C++/Rust software targeting the reMarkable 2's custom Linux kernel (toltec environment), directly accessing the epdc e-ink framebuffer (/dev/fb0) for low-latency pen tracking. It must integrate an embedded on-device handwriting recognition engine (or neural character recognizer) that feeds parsed AST nodes directly into an embedded Clojure/Lisp interpreter like Babashka or Janet, then repaints e-ink output cleanly. This demands specialized embedded Linux, hardware driver, and pen-digitizer latency optimization expertise.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Appload and Xovi (reMarkable app development frameworks), PaddlePaddle OCR (local handwriting recognition alternative), Linear TODO list, calendar apps
Concerns raised: 12-second latency for file writes to disk is prohibitive, Xochitl display driver is closed source, blocking development, USB-C port design breaks easily, company won't support repairs, Handwriting recognition accuracy varies significantly by handwriting quality, VLMs not effective at precise page decoration tasks
Feature requests: Native Linux kernel support with working display driver, Easy integration with Linear TODO lists and calendar apps on device, Jupyter-style notebook format with handwritten blocks and interpretations, Local OCR to avoid API latency, Direct framebuffer access for instant screen updates
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 2901 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #78 of 2902 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 214 days after the earliest competitor.
- Clerkenwell · hn · 2026-10-20 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.80
- neorepl · github · 2026-10-09 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.73
- Igor · hn · 2026-03-09 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- Cljbang.el · hn · 2026-07-22 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- Anki-LLM · hn · 2025-11-02 · 60 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- prompt-poet · github · 2026-11-05 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- rizzo-flow · github · 2026-09-21 · 455 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Local LLM code-generation with Gemma 4 e2B via JSON AST to Clojure · hn · 2026-05-19 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.53
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