Programming in the Sun: A Year with the Daylight Computer

Summary

I’ve been hinting on X/Twitter about my use of the Daylight DC-1 as a programming environment, and after about a year of use, it’s time to write about it in longer form. This isn’t a full product review, but rather an experience report on coding in sunlight. It’s also about the Boox Tab Ultra – which has a different type of display – and how it compares to the DC-1 for my use cases. This is not a sponsored post. Neovim in Termux on the Daylight DC-1. Why do I even bother, you might ask? Sunlight makes me energetic and alert, which I need when I work. Living in the Nordics, 50% of the year is primarily dark, so any direct daylight I can get becomes really important. I usually run light mode on my Framework laptop during the day, but working in actual daylight with these displays, or plain old paper, is even better. The Setup Here are the main components of this coding environment: Daylight DC-1: an Android-based tablet with a “Live Paper” display (Reflective LCD, not E-Ink) 8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard: a mechanical Bluetooth-enabled keyboard, with Kailh key switches and USB-C charging and optional connection Termux: a terminal emulator for Android, with a package collection based on apt SSH, tmux, and Neovim: nothing surprising here I use a slimmed-down version of my regular dotfiles, because this setup doesn’t use Nix. I’ve manually installed Neovim, tmux, and a few other essentials, using the package manager that comes with Termux. I’ve configured Termux to not show its virtual keyboard when a physical keyboard is connected (the Bluetooth keyboard). The Termux theme is “E-Ink” and the font is JetBrains Mono, all built into Termux. Neovim uses the built-in quiet colorscheme for maximum contrast. Certain work requires a more capable environment, and in those cases I connect to my workstation using SSH and run tmux in there. For writing or simpler programming projects (I’ve even done Rust work with Cargo, for instance), the local Termux environment is fine. Somet...