Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor

Got to mention that you can use your tablet on Linux GNOME DE not only for terminal: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.omgubuntu.co.uk&#x2F;2022&#x2F;06&#x2F;use-ipad-as-second-monitor-ubuntu-22-04" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.omgubuntu.co.uk&#x2F;2022&#x2F;06&#x2F;use-ipad-as-second-monit...</a> . Still waiting for even better solution, like streaming games to such second tablet &quot;monitor&quot;.

I&#x27;ve used Weylus [0]. It works over LAN, lets you control the mouse from your tablet. Sometimes it&#x27;s laggy, but you can configure the resolution so it&#x27;s not using too much bandwidth. I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s stable at all. Haven&#x27;t used it on a regular basis.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;H-M-H&#x2F;Weylus">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;H-M-H&#x2F;Weylus</a>

If you are on Windows and have extra laptops of devices hanging around SpaceDesk <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacedesk.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacedesk.net&#x2F;</a> to a great free app (not open source). I use it with on my Windows Dev machine (WSL2 FTW) and use old laptops as external displays. It works well even on WiFI.

Would be better if the LVDS ribbon cable connectors for all of these devices was more standardized, and you could just buy an adapter to HDMI&#x2F;Display Port. These actually exist but AFAIK there isn&#x27;t just one LVDS ribbon cable standard or even close to one.

Unfortunately, I find systemctl hard to type. If you start&#x2F;stop services somewhat frequently, I recommend this alias:<p><pre><code> alias sc=&#x27;sudo systemctl&#x27; </code></pre> This has the nice property in that it mirrors the &quot;service control&quot; (sc) utility in later versions of Windows NT that I grew up on. Should work in bash&#x2F;fish.<p>I have these others also when doing service development, because many of the subcommands start with &#x27;st*&#x27; and also having to change the second parameter each time is annoying. These work in fish, but are easily ported:<p><pre><code> function sce --description &#x27;systemctl stop # end&#x27; sc stop $argv; end function sci --description &#x27;systemctl status # info&#x27; sc status $argv; end function scs --description &#x27;systemctl start # start&#x27; sc start $argv; end</code></pre>

On a similar note, you can use your old phone as a Streamdeck alternative using TouchPortal [1]. It&#x27;s not free, but it won&#x27;t cost you much and it works surprisingly well.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.touch-portal.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.touch-portal.com&#x2F;</a>

Thats a cool idea, I have a Fire tablet (and a Kindle) that I still don&#x27;t know why I bought it.

Tablets should have a HDMI&#x2F;Displayport in so that you can directly use them as displays.

I&#x27;ve used Duet for this in the past. Works great by allowing me to extend my laptop screen with my ipad screen. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.duetdisplay.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.duetdisplay.com&#x2F;</a>

Good idea. I did this with bash and awk and xev and xdotool instead of a custom program.<p>You can always use screen&#x27;s cut-and-paste for stuff within screen, and screen&#x27;s copy buffer and xclipboard for the rest.

Worth mentioning this discussion that honed on latency specific when using Linux (Wayland) as a host os : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31409010">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31409010</a> -&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tuxphones.com&#x2F;howto-linux-as-second-wireless-display-for-linux&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tuxphones.com&#x2F;howto-linux-as-second-wireless-display...</a> (2022)

Tried doing this for years, only got more and more frustrated with whatever wacky software I had to install to make this work.

Genuinely curious but why would people put 2 displays side by side so that your neck would always be bent to a side?<p>That totally looks like a tiring solution. I never do that but put the main display (which is an external monitor of my laptop) parallel to the keyboard and my laptop to the side so I will be facing forward naturally.

very cool!<p>&gt; I also never have enough screens and never know where to put my terminal when I need to tail a log or something<p>What I do is just don&#x27;t think of the terminal as competing for screen space. My terminal is always full screen, and a single &quot;hotkey&quot; toggles between the world of GUI apps, and the terminal world. Then, you can divide up the terminal however you want; I use tmux.<p>I&#x27;ve been trying this for more than 10 years. initially with iterm2, which has a built in &quot;hotkey&quot;, and now with Alacritty, using hammerspoon for the hotkey. (the hotkey is sometimes called a &quot;visor&quot; key in this context, I think to do with first-person shooter games).

I&#x27;d just run screen on both computers in multisession mode, and make the PC version tiny

-HTOP&#x2F;Nethogs for system in question -Same for any intervening boxes -logs for middle boxes -web browser for reference lookups -window for manpages script noodling -window for debugging -vim -throw in some VM&#x27;s and those hosts may need to be factored in -frigging email&#x2F;chat&#x2F;calendar clients if working with other people.<p>Yes, I <i>can</i> technically do all of those with one screen, and some screen&#x2F;tmux magic. Fuck no, I do not want to. KVM can get you some ergo for mux&#x27;ing multiple boxes to a single screen. However, I&#x27;d much rather have multiple screens to partition my working set across.

Any options for an ancient iPad?

I appreciate the effort developers put into writing these apps.<p>On a side note, I wonder how much damage a back door in one of these &quot;harmless&quot; apps could do. It would have control of the tablet and of every computer the tablet was connected to.

This is cool. Maybe for copying you could spawn a text editor in your main screen with the content of the terminal in it?

When I had to work on my desktop but had to watch some educational videos on the side I just used <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;remotedesktop.google.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;remotedesktop.google.com&#x2F;</a> Since the videos were web based it worked quite well.

If manufacturers released enough details about their devices and drivers, then unlocked the bootloaders, we could do a lot more things than a 2nd monitor with old tablets. There are piles of them taking dust in drawers, or worse in landfills because of forced obsolescence.

Windows needs to vastly improve its multi monitor support. I have a 3070 which supports up to four monitors, but getting them to play nicely in Win11 is a pain. So much so that I just use DisplayFusion instead.

A long time ago I used to use Synergy and someone had written a Synergy client or Cyanogenmod variant of Android. I don&#x27;t know where all that is now after Synergy imploded and Cyanogenmod imploded.

Its one of those &#x27;because I can&#x27; hacks. Perfectly fine old 15-19 LCD monitors are ~$10 at goodwill type stores, and free if you ask around relatives&#x2F;friends for old gear.

Nice. I just dusted off wife&#x27;s kindle in an attempt to repurpose it into a weird &#x27;i m in a meeting&#x27; sign and I may end up looking at your project more closely now. Much obliged!<p>&lt;3

I prefer a single display and use virtual desktops to seperate tasks&#x2F;apps which each fill most&#x2F;all of the screen realestate

I&#x27;ve done this with RDP + Android tablet on Linux. Performance depends heavily on your tablet&#x27;s hardware, enormously so.

I never keep tablets around long - I usually sell them (and all electronics) once they&#x27;re no longer useful.<p>eBay is my Marie Kondo :-)

I would really be interested for a X11 server on that tablet.<p>So I can do a simple DISPLAY=tablet:0 to send the window to and enjoy output

Macos has the built in with sidecar. Just attach an ipad and select it as the external display

Can also be used as a janky screen pikvm style with the right adapters

I love the suggestion to rebuild it for the browser. A tool like that could be generally useful. Anyone know of one?

i use TeamViewer to log remotely into my working laptop from an Android device

I don&#x27;t know how folks can use a ton of screens like this. I had four 32&quot; monitors at one place and it was incredibly overwhelming.<p>I&#x27;ve been rocking a single 27&quot; screen for years. Even that&#x27;s too big. I prefer 24&quot; screens but it&#x27;s difficult to get a good one.<p>I can hold context in multiple virtual spaces, and key bindings make switching between them super quick.<p>I guess this is in the same camp as &quot;I don&#x27;t understand people who leave 75,000 tabs open.&quot;

Love this sort of hackery, but also -- it just kind of shows how very goofy all the limitations we have on this are.<p>If you go with the idea that a computer should be a general purpose machine -- we have so many things that <i>aren&#x27;t computers.</i><p>&quot;Wireless external monitor&quot; should be a trivially easy built-in to all operating systems, and that it isn&#x27;t is kind of ridiculous.

&gt; I have a couple old kindle fire tablets lying around. One of them has a battery that lasts about ten minutes.<p>You might want to check if the battery is going &quot;spicy pillow&quot;.

For Windows, the paid program SuperDisplay will also allow you to use an Android device as a second screen, works wireless or over USB. My Galaxy Tab S7+ is great as a second monitor.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;superdisplay.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;superdisplay.app&#x2F;</a>

Computers still only have three mainstream input devices, keyboard, mouse and gamepad after 60-80 years<p>I&#x27;d try and bring the addition inputs a smart phone has to computers, like touch.<p>I know there are programable keyboards and many other things. But no one has cracked it yet.<p>It&#x27;s a cool project as is. Just an idea if you were thinking of iterating forward.