Syncing Zettlr Between Machines
The quest for a distraction-free writing machine is ongoing but I think it’s getting closer to the finish line now. To recap what I’ve done, since I can’t remember how much of this I’ve blogged about and I can’t be bothered to go back and check:
- I’ve decided on Zettlr as my writing software of choice. It does basically everything I want a Markdown editor to do, and integrates perfectly with my Pandoc workflow. (More about all of that here).
- I picked up a cheap Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon from eBay and spent a little bit of time setting up Debian and making it boot straight into Zettlr.
- Because I want this machine to be “offline first”, I decided I want to work from a local folder containing my files that is then synced to a GDrive folder. I wrote a Python script that uses
rcloneto compare the two folders and make sure all of the most recent files are present in both. Then I put a shortcut to launch that script on my taskbar (if that’s the right term for Debian - I don’t know or care). My workflow with this machine is now:
- Login
- Wait for Zettlr to boot
- Click the shortcut icon
- Watch the new files populate into Zettlr
- Write
- Sync again when my work is done
I’m very happy with it, but I was still having issues with my PC in that Zettlr was very slow to update files. I realised that this is because I was pointing my PC version at the GDrive file, and that GDrive desktop sync is just painfully slow. So this morning I grabbed that same Python script and made it work on my PC (which was as simple as downloading and setting up rclone on the PC and making a new local folder to store my work, then changing the paths in the script to reflect the file structure of this system).
A quick test this morning shows that it’s working smoothly, and files appear in Zettlr immediately after syncing. The next step will be to see if I can also make this work on my Chromebook, which I expect will be much trickier, but the fact is that now I have the ThinkPad I probably won’t use that machine for writing much at all anymore, so it’s not really an issue.
Next step is probably to disable the browser and any internet access beyond syncing on the ThinkPad so that it can be truly distraction-free. I still wish I had an e-ink screen to write on, but I’ve got a blue light filtering screen protector on the way that will serve as something of a compromise.
Regardless, I’m pretty happy with this solution. It’s cost me the grand total of £50 and a day or two of messing around with Debian and writing some Python, and that’s much better than paying a fortune for something like a FreeWrite. And while using a separate keyboard with a laptop in public is a little obnoxious, that’s still a possibility if I discover that I don’t really like the laptop form for working on long-term.