TL;DR: Thank you for confirming some mismatch in display hardware and project goals

> also, evaluating things 60 times a second is not a good fit for low-power systems of any kind.

Agreed. As to a terminal-mode UXN, you pointed out:

> as for uxn, uxn is the first attempt at frugal "write once, run anywhere" that's good enough to criticize. everyone should read devine's talk about its aspirations

I think it's the primary use case like Java Applets and Flash preceded JS as iterations of sorta-portable and low efficiency tools which make up for it with sheer volume of high-familiarity material.

> nor is it good for programmer productivity

I'm curious about this. Could you please elaborate?

When trying earlier uxntal versions, the worst part seemed to be the string syntax. If it wasn't because it seemed easier at the time, my guess is the pain point might be intentional nudges away from making things the designer doesn't like.

> and it’s not all that simple.

This is where I get confused:

* Can you explain more about your views on this?

* Do you favor a specific structure of hardware, OS code, and user scripts, or whatever ends up offering the best use of power and long-term device durability?

> i'm not sure how well the existing varvara applications will work at 400×240 or tolerate a requirement to use fonts many pixels tall in order to be readable

Counting mW and decades implies text > GUI. Despite 100r & fans favoring GUI, there's an UXN terminal mode and a few math and terminal libraries written for it.

As to GUI, many of the ecosystem's GUI programs are FOSS with room to shrink the graphics. There's a decent 4x6 px ASCII font which is CC0 and could help, but as fair warning, it's awful at accents and umlauts.

> possibly i just haven't written enough forth to have the enlightenment experience yet, but currently my hypothesis is that forth is just hard to read and that's it, and that the really great thing about forth is not actually the language but the interactive development experience

This seems to be a universal opinion since REPL isn't rare anymore. Being portable and easy to bootstrap are probably the main draw now. In addition to 100r's work, I think remember hearing ${NAME}boot or another project used it to simplify porting.

> the varvara display model is not a good fit for the memory-in-pixel displays, which only have one bit per pixel, while varvara requires two.

Ah, this is what I suspected. I wasn't sure I understood the display you mentioned, so thank you for confirming the hardware mismatch.

Although your blog showed you'd considered two identical side-by-side displays[1], I have a radical idea which might not be a good one:

1. A "Full" display of W x H characters (the Sharp display or whatever you replace it with)

2. A "Fallback" 1 or 2 line display (2nd line reserved for editor info / UI?)

A single 1-bit editable line is so hard to work with that ed[2] isn't even installed by default on many Linux distros. However, people did once got real work done with it and similar tools.

As a funny sidenote, this is where non-colorForth[3] forths may align with UXN's dev. He's a Plan9 fan and uses its Acme editor[4]. So Varvara is theoretically capable of syntax highlighting, but he refuses to implement it as far as I know.

> as for tools for software development, program launching, editing text, editing fonts, editing other graphics, and sequencing music, i'm confident i can write those myself if i have to. i've written a compiler in a subset of scheme that compiles itself, a compiler in a forth-like language that compiles itself, various toy text editors, various virtual machines in under 150 lines of code, and various pieces of music synthesis software

You may be pleasantly surprised by how many people will show up if you start building and releasing tools which:

* let them solve problems or have fun

* allow extending the tool

* can be used to build their own tools

Many will will even contribute back. To paraphrase the Gren[5] maintainer's recent livestream:

> we've had more engagement in our time on Discord than all our years on Zulip.[6]

> maybe i should set up a patreon for this or something, maybe people would be interested in supporting the project

Based on your blog, I think you can safely skip to the footnotes:

* GitHub sponsors might be worthwhile if you're willing to use non-fully FOSS platforms

* Don't make people feel like they're paying for their own work

* Do let the system do real-ish creative work and self-host, even if only as emulators

If you'd like, I can provide more specific suggestions.

[1]: https://blog.za3k.com/zorchpad-update-cardboard-mockup-mk1/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(software)

[3]: https://concatenative.org/wiki/view/colorForth

[4]: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/acme.html

[5]: https://gren-lang.org/ (Disclaimer: I sorta contribute to this now)

[6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO8_pV7r168 (Sorry, I don't have an exact timestamp, but I'm pretty sure it was in here)