Remapping the Useless AI Slop Copilot Key in Linux

I recently bought an external Dell keyboard that came with a dedicated Copilot key. Since I don't use Microsoft's Copilot, the key was doing nothing useful.

My new Dell Keyboard comes with a CoPilot key

So, I decided to map it to the YouTube Music web app. There is no such app, but I created it as a PWA using Vivaldi.

In theory, it seems like a trivial thing, but making the Copilot key launch that web app came up as a decent challenge. And hence this tutorial.

My first attempt was using KDE's System Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts. I created a shortcut for the YouTube Music PWA and tried assigning the Copilot key to it.

Unfortunately, KDE only detected the key as Meta+Shift and completely ignored the function key that was part of the key combination.

After a bit of searching, I came across a Reddit post that suggested using the keyd utility to remap the key at a lower level. That turned out to be exactly what I needed.

Instead of trying to use the original key combination, I remapped the Copilot key to Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12. It is a key combination that is rarely used, making shortcut conflicts highly unlikely.

Why KDE Can't Detect the Copilot Key

On my keyboard, pressing the Copilot key actually sends Meta+Shift+F23.

The problem is that KDE's shortcut recorder only captures the Meta+Shift modifiers and ignores the F23 key entirely. As a result, it is impossible to assign the Copilot key directly through the graphical settings.

The solution is to intercept the key before KDE receives it and translate it into another shortcut that KDE can recognize normally. This is exactly what keyd does.

Install keyd

On Arch Linux, install keyd using:

sudo pacman -S keyd

It is also available in the official repositories of Ubuntu 26.04 and above.

Enable and start the service:

sudo systemctl enable --now keyd

Verify that it is running:

sudo systemctl status keyd

Identify Your Keyboard

First, identify the vendor and product ID of your external keyboard.

Run:

sudo keyd monitor

Locate your external keyboard in the output and note its vid:pid value. Make sure you choose the external keyboard instead of your laptop's built-in keyboard.

device added: aaaa:bbbb:cccccccc Dell KB216 Wired Keyboard Consumer Control (/dev/input/event9)
device added: aaaa:bbbb:cccccccc Dell KB216 Wired Keyboard System Control (/dev/input/event8)
device added: aaaa:bbbb:cccccccc Dell KB216 Wired Keyboard (/dev/input/event7)
device added: dddd:eeee:ffffffff Keychron Keychron K8 Pro Keyboard (/dev/input/event6)

Verify the Copilot Key

To see what the Copilot key actually sends, run:

sudo keyd monitor

Now press the Copilot key.

You should see output similar to:

leftmeta down
leftshift down
f23 down
f23 up
leftshift up
leftmeta up

This confirms that the key sends the combination:

Meta + Shift + F23

Create the keyd Configuration

Create a configuration file for your external keyboard.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/keyd
sudo nano /etc/keyd/externalKeyboard.conf

Replace the keyboard ID with your own vid:pid.

[ids]
aaaa:bbbb:cccccccc
- [main]
leftshift+leftmeta+f23 = C-A-S-f12

Here's what each part does:

The [ids] section limits the remapping to the selected keyboard, leaving your built-in keyboard and other input devices untouched.

• C, A, S, and M represent Ctrl, Alt, Shift, and Meta.
• The left side specifies the key combination received from the keyboard.
• The right side defines the new shortcut that will be sent to the system.

Apply the Configuration

Reload keyd:

sudo keyd reload

Normally, you do not need to log out or reboot.

If this is your first time installing keyd and the remap does not work immediately, a reboot is worth trying.

Verify the Remapping

Run the monitor again:

sudo keyd monitor

Press the Copilot key once more.

This time, you should see the newly assigned shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12) instead of the original Meta+Shift+F23.

keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftalt down
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftshift down
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftcontrol down
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      f12 down
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      f12 up
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftalt up
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftshift up
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftcontrol up

Assign the Shortcut in KDE

Now that the Copilot key sends a standard shortcut, KDE can detect it correctly.

Open System Settings → Shortcuts. Here, click on the Add New button on the top-right and select Application.

Add a new Application

From the list of sections, select Vivaldi Apps (or other apps of your choice) and then YouTube Music.

Select the YouTube Music PWA

Locate the application shortcut you want to configure, click the shortcut field, and press the Copilot key or CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+F12.

Add Shortcut for YouTube Music PWA

Since keyd is now emitting Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12, KDE records the shortcut without any issues.

Check for Shortcut Conflicts

Before deciding on a shortcut, it's worth checking whether KDE or KWin already uses it.

For example, whether Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12 toggles the KWin compositor in X11 sessions.

You can search for existing shortcuts by running:

grep -i "F12\|F13\|F14" ~/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

Before I end this this tutorial, let me share a few things that you should know about using this method.

Hot plugging: keyd automatically detects when the keyboard is connected or disconnected through udev. You don't need to restart the service after plugging in the keyboard.

Mouse remapping: keyd only handles keyboard input. If you need to remap mouse buttons, consider tools such as input-remapper or xremap.

Disable the remapping: If you want to temporarily restore the original keyboard behavior, simply stop the service:

sudo systemctl stop keyd

With that, you should be able to make some good use of CoPilot key on Linux.

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Turns Out Wayland Isn't the Input Lag Disaster Everyone Says it is

The idea that Wayland has worse input lag than X11 has been floating around Linux gaming circles for years. Some numbers backing the claim did come up back in 2025, when a developer measured GNOME's Wayland session against X11 and reported some considerable extra latency.

More recently, Marco Nett decided to test the same question (along with a few others) on his gaming rig, and instead of using a mobile phone camera to calculate latency, he cooked up a DIY device to measure it himself.

What do the numbers say?

0:00

/0:03

Source: Marco Nett

Called the Click2photon, it is a DIY device that straps a light sensor to the monitor and fires simulated mouse clicks over USB. It measures the time between a click and the resulting change on screen, giving out real end-to-end latency numbers.

As a side note, the hardware, firmware, and analysis code for the testing device are freely available on GitHub.

He ran the tests on Diabotical, a CPU-bound DirectX 11 game, through Proton on CachyOS with an RTX 4070 SUPER and a 500 Hz OLED monitor. He went looking for answers in varying scenarios.

Testing X11 against native Wayland, VRR on against off, and a DXVK low-latency fork on against off. He also ran a bonus set of tests comparing native Wayland to XWayland, with every configuration standardized at 300 clicks.

The results undercut a lot of what gets discussed online. The eight main test cases land within 0.72 ms of each other, with medians ranging from 4.21 ms to 4.93 ms.

Source: Marco Nett

X11 beats Wayland by just 0.14 to 0.22 ms, nowhere near enough to explain Wayland's reputation for feeling laggy. Enabling VRR cuts latency by 0.26 to 0.45 ms and tightens the spread of results, more than any other factor tested.

Up to 0.84 ms gets saved in uncapped scenarios once the dxvk-low-latency fork is turned on. The real culprit is XWayland, which adds 3.13 ms on top of native Wayland, more than every other factor combined.

Stacking every optimization together (X11, VRR, and the low-latency fork) only moved the median down by 0.72 ms compared to a plain Wayland setup.

What does this mean for Linux gamers?

For the average Linux gamer, the lesson isn't to abandon Wayland for X11. It's to turn on VRR if your display supports it, get the dxvk-low-latency fork installed if your setup allows it, and make sure games run through native Wayland instead of XWayland.

What I have covered here is a distilled summary of the testing done by Marco, I highly suggest you give the original blog a read. He has taken a lot of variables into account, and listing them individually would've made you click away from this article. 😅

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Cursor AI's Silence on a Critical Flaw Jeopardizes Millions of Users

Mindgard just disclosed an unpatched 0-day in Cursor yesterday, where a poisoned repository could trigger arbitrary code on Windows systems without the developer needing to do anything on their end.

The bug lives in how Cursor resolves Git binaries when a project loads. Cursor checks several locations for git, and one of them is the workspace itself.

Plant a file called git.exe at the root of a repository, and Cursor runs it the moment that project opens. This happens because the execution is integrated into the normal startup routine, something you'd probably never notice unless you went looking for it.

Mindgard proved this by renaming the Windows Calculator app to git.exe and placing it in a test repo. Opening that repo in Cursor launched it instantly, with the flaw repeatedly spawning new instances of the app.

Here you can see many instances of the Calculator app being launched by Cursor repeatedly.

This is not something Cursor didn't know about. Mindgard's Aaron Portnoy first reported the bug on December 15, 2025, then followed up repeatedly in the months after.

Getting anyone to respond took a public LinkedIn post asking for a security contact. Cursor's CISO eventually replied privately, blaming a broken automation for the missed HackerOne invite.

The stonewalling didn't stop there, as the bug report on HackerOne was closed prematurely, being termed "informative and out of scope." Mindgard pushed back, HackerOne reopened it, and confirmed the details had reached Cursor.

Days passed, and the silence from Cursor was more apparent. Requests for updates in February, March, and April were left unanswered, all while they were busy shipping new releases.

Five months of cat and mouse, and Mindgard finally decided to go public.

There's a response

Just a placeholder image of Cursor's Linux build.

Albeit a very vague one. Speaking to Dark Reading, an unnamed spokesperson for Cursor informed them that:

I can confirm we are addressing this and will get back to Mindgard accordingly.

That statement isn't very confidence-instilling for an issue that feels magnitudes higher.

But what do I know about handling sensitive cybersecurity issues in a big AI firm? Maybe they had good reason to ignore the issue and were working on some shiny new AI feature. 🤷

---

Suggested Read 📖: Did you know a storage bug on Windows 11 could eat up disk space?

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GNOME Wants to Let You Test Experimental Features Without Breaking Anything

Testing experimental software is a hassle right now. You either wait for a stable release, or you dive into the pit of nightly builds hoping the whole thing doesn't fall on your head.

That gets worse on image-based systems like GNOME OS, where the base image is read-only and you can't just swap out a package and move on.

GNOME wants to fix that with a new app it's prototyping, tentatively called Test Center.

Something new to tackle testing

It is meant to act as a one-stop solution for installing, running, and removing anything experimental, whether that's an app or a piece of the system itself.

For apps, you skip the usual grind of hunting down CI artifacts or building your own Flatpak bundle by hand. A developer hands you a link, you tap it, and the build shows up tagged as experimental, set to expire on its own.

System components run on sysext images instead of Flatpaks, though the idea plays out the same way. Take something like parental controls, still early in development, you'd grab the sysext tied to that merge request through Test Center, and it lands on your system as an overlay rather than a replacement.

Remove it, and you restore your system to the same state before the experimental change was applied.

Plus, there's a good reason system-level testing has been such a mess up to now.

According to Modal Collective, the closest thing on a regular package-based distro is packaging your changes into an unofficial repo like a COPR or PPA and asking testers to install from there themselves.

Once they do, the experimental packages don't sit next to the stable ones, they replace them outright. Break something, and it's on you to fix it. You won't get proper updates again until you do.

What's next?

All this effort is part of the GNOME OS Developer Tool Suite, a project that's been in funding through Germany's Prototype Fund since June 2026. Tobias Bernard, Jonas Dreßler, and a few others are working on this under the Modal Collective umbrella.

In a related plan, an easier way to distribute command-line developer tools on image-based systems is also part of the same project, though the team says more details on that are coming in a separate post.

If you're developing for GNOME OS and have opinions on what's currently annoying about testing and development workflows, the team wants to hear from you on Matrix, in the #gnome-os room, or in person at the GNOME OS BoF during GUADEC.

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7 Open Source Trello Alternatives For Your Kanban Boards

I started using Trello around 2013-14 to work on a team project. Trello was new and rising at the time for its simplicity of providing a collaborative Kanban board.

After its acquisition and recent AI surge, Trello has changed a lot. But I still miss its simplicity in Kanban style tools I have tried so far.

As I lean more towards, open source and self-hosting, I have collected a bunch of projects that can be considered in the same league as Trello.

My search for open source Trello alternatives were based on mainly finding simple kanban boards with team collaboration and public boards option. Integration to external services, mobile apps and the ability to import Trello projects are also worth considering. Since we are in AI era, automation and AI agent access can also be not ignored.

So, let's begin to see what open source tool can replace Trello for you.

Kan.bn

Kan is a sleek, modern looking Kanban task board. Built with Typescript, Kan provides a modern user interface and experience. It comes with all of the classic Trello features so you get boards and workpaces, labels and filtering. You also have the ability to comment and check activity logs on the tasks.

There is no automation or AI feature at the time of writing this article. Which is not entirely a bad thing because sometimes simplicity itself is a feature.

One thing that does bother me is the lack of smartphone apps. I like to keep a track on tasks while on the move.

That doesn't mean Kan doesn't provide ways for efficient work. They are already working on implementing templates so that you can easily create same type of tasks. Integrations with external tools is also a work in progress.

The biggest feature for people moving away from Trello is that you can import your Trello boards directly in Kan. That makes it a true open source alternative to Trello.

Kan can be self-hosted or you can pay for their hosted service. Hosted service is free for single user.

💡

Use it if you want to move your existing Trello tasks to a self-hosted tool with modern look and feel.

Planka

If you want to use something that looks and feels like Trello, look no further than Planka. Look at the screenshots, and you'll feel like you are looking at Trello itself.

You get all the usual Trello and kanban board features. You have lists with tasks and those tasks can have deadline and time tracking. Kanban, grid and list views are available. You should also be able to import your Trello tasks here.

REST API with 50+ webhook events helps you integrate task management with external tools in your workflow.

Public boards were supposed to arrive with version 2 but I don't think that has happened yet.

Organizations can have single sign on along with Google, Azure AD and more.

There are no official mobile apps for now. If you must use one, there is a community app in progress. I would suggest waiting for the official mobile apps, instead.

Licensing and pricing are issues here. There are two versions: community and pro. Both versions are available in hosted and self-hosted formats. The pro version has additional features like user roles, recurring cards, UI customization for organization branding etc. You can self-host the community edition for free. Everything else has a price tag, including self-hosting the pro version.

Licensing is 'fair use' and it is not clear that they use a clear, open source solution. I would keep them in 'source open' category.

💡

Use it if you want a Trello style Kanban task board for your organization and you are okay using a source open software with no public boards.

Vikunja

Vikunja is primarily and open source, self-hostable Kanban board that you can use on your own and with your team. You can add labels, create relation between tasks, add deadlines and priorities.

Tasks and boards and can be shared with public, too. This makes it is easy to collaborate with external people and they don't even have to create an account.

Apart from Kanban, you also get list, tabular and Gantt chart views. Recurring tasks, sub tasks, due date notification, you get them all.

I like the idea of the "quick add magic". It's a helpful featuere specially if you work with AI to create task description. In the description, use keywords like mention a date and it adds that as a due date. This saves you the trouble of manually assigning labels, due dates, priorities etc.

Vikunja doesn't have smartphone apps but it does let you import your Trello projects.

Written in Go, Vikunja claims to be speedy. How to verify the claim? Well, there is a demo board you can test, no lon in required.

It is AGPL licensed and you can self host it on your own or opt for managed hosting from Vikunja itself.

💡

Use it if you want a true open source, self-hostable tool to manage tasks individually or for an organization.

Wekan

Wekan is one of the OG open source Trello alternatives. You can self host it on your servers. It feels more enterprise and organization oriented than individuals and lean team. The interface is a bit dated for my liking but still good enough for managing tasks without eye candy.

The promise is simple. You get boards, lists and tasks. It is collaborative and since its enterprise oriented, there is option to purchase commercial support.

There are mobile apps listed on their website but I didn't find anything on the Trello import. No AI integration as far as I can see.

💡

Use it if you want a true open source, self-hostable tool for an enterprise.

Tududi

Funny sounding name aside, Tududi is somewhat of a Clickup alternative. You have boards, areas (work, life, personal) and the ability to create notes. Which is a great way to share common docs with the team.

There are plenty of features to like here. Recurring tasks, subtasks, priorities, labeling, deadlines. All the usual stuff is already here with a few smart features. Progress can be tracked with completion stats and productivity patterns.

No smartphone apps but responsive design makes it easy to follow tasks on web browser on your mobile devices. Don't see automation or AI features here, either. Not sure about public board, too.

It can be self-hosted via Docker or you can use the hosted service from the developer.

💡

Use it if you want an open source Kanban tool with the ability to add docs.

Leantime

While not exactly a Trello clone, Leantime is a project management tool created specifically with ADHD and neurodivergence in mind. So you get more color codings, emoji-based priority features.

There is a "personal view" that shows all your tasks in one place irrespective of which board they belong to. This is something I have seen in ClickUp.

You can also take notes that won't be saved in the main tasks and would only be used in personal view.

You can track productivity with built in reports and see how the project is coming together.

Another thing that I feel is helpful is the ability to create a blueprint for a project. So instead of creating the main project board immediately, this can be used for the (pre) planning phase.

Leantime also has builtin whiteboard for creating mind maps and wireframes to visually represent your thoughts.

💡

Use Leantime if you have people with ADHD in your team and you are not looking for an exact Trello replacement.

Fizzy

From the makers of Basecamp, Fizzy is a relatively new tool and claims to make "Kanban as it was supposed to be". Which means it is keeping things simple by giving you boards with only the most essential features.

We have been using Fizzy for the past several months for managing our tasks here at It's FOSS.

Auto close is the feature that you won't easily find in other project management tools. Once you add a task, it gets added to Maybe list by default. And if the task sees no activity (edits, comments, moving to other lists), it gets moved to a "Not now" list that is hidden from the main view.

Another thing here is that no matter how many lists (columns) you add, you can only view two of them at a time. Helps with focus, apparently.

Fizzy has smartphone apps that makes it easier to manage tasks without sitting in front of a computer.

My biggest gripe with Fizzy is that it doesn't have a deadline feature. Everything is either Maybe, Intermediate lists or Done. And then removing tasks from Done list is done one by one manually, no multi-select here. So if your board has hundreds of finished tasks and you didn't delete them immediately, you have to delete them one by one. Or you just let them stay in the Done section which kind of looks odd when the number increases.

Public boards are available in Fizzy so you can use it for sharing project roadmaps. Webhooks let you integrate to external tools.

Fizzy also has CLI version and thus allowing you to use an AI agent for accessing and managing the board, if that's your thing.

There is no direct way for importing Trello projects in Fizzy. So that's something worth noting. Also, Fizzy is source available, not open source.

You can self-host it or use the hosted service which is free anyways.

💡

If deadlines is not something you need and you are okay with source available, Fizzy is a good choice as it is free even in hosted version.

Bonus: Schedule

Now this one is completely different than the rest of the Trello alternatives mentioned here. Schedule is a simple, kanban style todo list of your Linux desktop. It doesn't have collaboration features, cannot be self hosted or accessed via web browsers.

It's a desktop application. You install it, you create your boards, add tasks and work on them. Sometimes you need that. Either you don't work with a team or external collaborators or you just want a separate place for your personal projects.

And if that's the case for you, a regular desktop kanban app like Schedule does the job.

💡

Use this for personal task management on your desktop only.

Which tool should you use to replace Trello?

I have deliberately not included these in my list here:

• Nextcloud Deck: Kanban feature is good but it's just one part of a different type of software suite.
• Plane, Mattermost and OpenProject: Full-fledged project management suite. Overkill for just Kanban feature.
• Kanboard, Restyboard, Taskboard: No longer actively developed.
• Nocobase, Baserow: More of no code CRM oriented tools than just Kanban boards.

And to answer the question...it all depends on your requirements.

If you want a simple Kanban tool that looks modern, go with Kan. You can use it for free or self host it or opt for the paid hosted version. Fizzy is also a good choice if you don't need deadline features. Vikunja is also rising in popularity and worth a dekko.

I would suggest checking each tool and its features and see if they will be your ideal open source Trello alternatives.

Your turn now. Which Kanban tool do you use? Did you find something worth trying in this list? Share it in the comments,

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Slack Who? This Self-Hosted Chat App Just Went Open Source

Slack is the solution most teams think of first when they are in the market for a chat application. It is known for being feature-packed, fast, and consistently updated, making it a go-to for millions of teams across the world.

But no matter how good it is, it is not open source. 🙃

Thankfully, the open source space has no shortage of alternatives. Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, Zulip, and Matrix-based clients like Element have all built up loyal followings among teams who want to own their data.

Now there's a new name to add to that list. It's called Chatto, and it's still early in its development cycle, with a stable 1.0 release yet to arrive.

Chatto goes open

After spending the past few months developing Chatto, Hendrik Mans has decided to offer the project openly under AGPL-3.0+ with a few Apache-2.0 exceptions for certain components.

It's built as a self-hosted option for teams who would otherwise reach for Slack, Teams, or Discord. Hendrik wanted something light on resources, simple enough that an administrator can just run the executable and get started.

It covers the essentials you would expect from a chat app. That includes channels, rooms, file sharing, video embeds, and a roles and permissions system for fine control over which user gets what kind of access.

You also get screen sharing, along with end-to-end encryption on every voice and video call, and the number of people that can join comes down to what kind of capacity your server has.

Going forward

Right now, there's no dedicated desktop or mobile client. Chatto's roadmap lists both as something that could be worked on, but they're still in the discovery phase, meaning that they are still deliberating on whether to offer those.

Beyond the client apps, the roadmap lists a dedicated Slack to Chatto migration tool, along with GDPR-compliant data export, thread locking, and thread deletion as planned feature additions.

Hendrik is currently working on new room types, bot accounts with dedicated API tokens, Chatto hub integration, and server-wide user suspension. Next in line are an emergency lockdown mode for admins, slow mode, in-app message reporting, and server invites.

For anyone who'd rather skip the self-hosting altogether, Chatto Cloud is entering public beta soon too. It'll run on European-owned infrastructure, with neat perks like automatic scaling and nightly backups.

Don't worry about vendor lock-in either, as moving data in or out of it will be made accessible.

---

Suggested Read 📖: Best Open Source Slack Alternatives

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Open Book Touch is Crowdfunding: A Buttonless, Open Hardware Answer to Kindle

Back in 2020, I wrote about Open Book: a DIY, open source e-reader project from developer Joey Castillo that you could solder together yourself... at least in theory. It had a 4.2 inch e-paper screen, seven physical buttons for navigation, and the kind of "anyone with a soldering iron can build one" ambition that attracts a certain kind of small userbase.

Six years later, Castillo is back with Open Book Touch. It is built on the same idea just that it's more of a ready-to-use, out of the box kind of product this time. If need be, you can still take it apart and modify it as needed. The new project just went live on Crowd Supply.

With "own your data" becoming a way to resist against Big Tech's walled garden, an open source alternative to Kindle's ecosystem is exactly the kind of thing that appeals to many of us open source lovers. No account needed, no DRM, nothing "phoning home". If you have a good ebook coolection, a device like this is worth adding to wishlist, at least for me.

📝 Key Specifications

• Display: 4.26" e-paper touchscreen, 480 × 800 px, warm + cool frontlight
• Processor: ESP32-S3 dual-core, Wi-Fi + Bluetooth LE
• Memory: 16 MB flash, 8 MB PSRAM
• Formats: EPUB and plain text, no DRM
• Storage: microSD card slot
• Interface: USB-C with integrated LiPo charging
• Dimension: 78 × 120 × 10 mm, about 85 g
• Open source: MIT-licensed firmware, open hardware (to be released at shipping)

The base model is $149, with a limited "Author's Edition" going for $249 during the campaign only.

The most obvious change from the original Open Book is right there on the front. Where the old board had a directional pad, a select button, and dedicated page-turn buttons, Open Book Touch is a single symmetrical slab, just 1 cm thin, with a capacitive touchscreen doing all the work instead. That's why it is called Open Book Touch, perhaps.

The exclusion of physical buttons makes sense because it is a tiny device. The touchscreen sits on a 4.26 inch e-paper panel at 480 × 800 pixels, working out to roughly 220 ppi, sharper than you'd expect at that size. It's a 1-bit display at its core meaning fast, crisp black and white for page turns. Slower 2-bit grayscale mode is reserved for the lock screen, so a book cover or your own photo renders in more shades of gray.

Frontlight uses five warm and five cool LEDs together, so you get a warm tone for reading in bed or something cooler for daylight, rather than being stuck with the single-temperature light.

At its core lies an ESP32-S3, paired with 16 MB of flash and 8 MB of PSRAM, the kind of arrangement you'd want for parsing EPUB files on a microcontroller instead of a full Linux SBC. The firmware itself is C++ on ESP-IDF and FreeRTOS, with SQLite quietly tracking your library's metadata.

Typesetting gets some attention too: justified text with proper hyphenation (English, Spanish, French, and Italian dictionaries are included), inline dithered images, and text set in bitmap versions of open source Lucida Bright and Lucida Sans fonts, complete with true bold and italic weights.

Language support is pretty impressive for a new device. GNU Unifont ships on the device as a fallback covering around 70,000 glyphs, the interface itself is localized into seven languages including Arabic and Hebrew. They have also implemented the Unicode bidirectional algorithm so right-to-left scripts shape correctly instead of just rendering backwards.

There's no DRM support here, by design. Books load from a microSD card or over local Wi-Fi. You may also manage metadat of library with SQLite.

There is no companion app here. This 'feature' could be an inconvenience, too, if you like reading on more than one devices like your computer or smartphone. Perhaps later, something can be thought about it,

The 800 mAh (minimum) LiPo battery is user-replaceable, and the 3D-printed snap-fit case is designed to be taken apart, with printable CAD files included if you want to make your own in a different color.

Whatever happened to the original?

The original Open Book won Hackaday's "Take Flight with Feather" contest in January 2020, a competition sponsored by Adafruit and DigiKey for Feather-compatible boards.

That win was supposed to mean a manufactured run of at least 100 units landing on DigiKey's shelves. From what I recall, that specific retail run doesn't seem to have fully materialized.

Castillo sold bare PCBs himself through Tindie starting mid-2020, and by that October, more than 100 Open Book and E-Book FeatherWing boards had shipped to makers willing to solder them together at home.

So it did shipped, sort of, just not like DigiKey retail run originally promised. But real boards did reach real people as a DIY kit rather than a finished product. The project kept evolving after that, through an RP2040-based "Open Book Abridged" and, eventually, a full reimagining that led to Open Book Touch.

The original Open Book had all its schematics and firmware public on GitHub from day one, before a single board existed. Open Book Touch is a bit different for now. Castillo has open sourced Focus, the C++ application framework that powers the device's interface, and the firmware is MIT-licensed.

But the board files, enclosure CAD, and the Open Book Touch-specific firmware itself are staying private until the campaign ships, going public to backers first and everyone else after. This is what's promised by the developer.

Get Open Book Touch

Open Book Touch is live on Crowd Supply now. At the time of writing, the campaign has raised $25,658 of its $45,000 goal from 131 backers, with about five weeks left to go.

Back Open Book Touch on Crowd Supply

Pledges start at $149 for the standard Open Book Touch (free US shipping, $12 elsewhere), with a $249 "Author's Edition" in a special enclosure available only during the campaign.

Crowd Supply is targeting early 2027 to get the first units to backers, fulfilled through its usual partner, Mouser. Manufacturing runs through NextPCB's Launchpad program, with the e-paper panel itself coming from Good Display.

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As with any crowdfunding campaign, treat the timeline as an estimate. Back it because you want to support the project, not because you're counting on the ship date.

If you just want the reading experience Castillo designed, the $149 tier gets you the full thing. Go for the $249 Author's Edition only if the nicer enclosure matters to you, since the electronics inside are identical.

Suggested Read: If Open Book Touch is out of your price range or you'd rather build one yourself, we've rounded up several DIY open source e-reader projects you can put together at home.

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