RMStylusButton is a small stand-alone program that runs on the reMarkable 2. It detects stylus button presses to switch to the eraser tool and trigger undo and redo actions.
It should work with any EMR (Wacom-compatible) stylus. It has been tested with the Lamy ALstar EMR stylus, and similar tools have reported success with:
- Kindle Scribe Pen
- Samsung S6 S Pen
- Wacom One Pen CP91300B2Z
- iFlytec T1 4096
Installation of RMStylusButton requires an SSH connection to your reMarkable device. This reMarkable guide page can get you started.
To download RMStylusButton, SSH into your device and run
wget https://github.com/rschroll/RMStylusButton/releases/download/v3.0/RMStylusButton.tar.gz -O- | tar xz
This will download and unpack several files to a newly-created RMStylusButton directory.
To test it out, run
./RMStylusButton/RMStylusButton
(See below for usage details.) Use Ctrl-C to stop the program.
To install RMStylusButton and have it start automatically, run
./RMStylusButton/manage.sh install
Your stylus button should work immediately, as well as after restarts.
When you install an updated version of the reMarkable software, it will erase the changes that cause RMStylusButton to start automatically. The files downloaded above should still be present, so just SSH in and again run
./RMStylusButton/manage.sh install
If you don't want RMStylusButton active anymore, SSH into your device and run
./RMStylusButton/manage.sh uninstall
If you desire, you can also delete the downloaded files:
rm -r RMStylusButton
A note about security
Downloading and running binaries from random people on the internet is not a great idea, security-wise. For openness, the binary is built on GitHub Actions. You can checkout the workflow and examine the build logs. A sha256sum of the tarball is computed in the build process. Use this to verify that the files you downloaded was the same as was built in the GitHub Action. On either your reMarkable or your computer, run
sha256sum RMStylusButton.tar.gz
The output should be the same as in the GitHub Actions log for the version that you have downloaded.
Press and hold the button on your stylus to erase. Release the button to switch back to whatever pen you had selected.
Double-click the button to undo the most recent action. Triple-click the button to redo that action.
RMStylusButton can be configured by options passed to the binary or to the manage.sh install command. Valid options are
--toggle |
Single presses of the button toggle between erase mode and pen mode. |
To build RMStylusButton for the reMarkable, you need the reMarkable toolchain. I've been using the official 4.0.117 release for the reMarkable 2. The toolchain is intended for Linux machines, but I know people have gotten it to run in Docker.
This file is a self-extracting shell script, which unpacks, by default to /opt/codex. You may need to run the script as root.
You will need to source the environment-setup file that got installed with the toolchain to get everything set up for cross-compilation. Then, simply running make should build the RMStylusButton binary. make RMStylusButton.tar.gz will assemble a tarball with the binary and the manage.sh script.
To help with development, the make deploy target attempts to copy the tarball over to the reMarkable device. It assumes that it can be reached at remarkable.local. If that's not the case, set the rmdevice environmental variable with the right host name or IP address.
Stylus events appear in /dev/input/event1 on the reMarkable 2. RMStylusButton watches this event stream for button presses. When it sees events indicating that erasing should happen, it injects events corresponding to the eraser button.
Undo and redo actions are triggered by creating a uinput keyboard device and injecting Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y events.
Other tools provide similar capabilities to RMStylusButton, but with different features and mechanisms. Here are the ones I know about.
- RemarkableLamyEraser was the starting point for this project. This project has been paused by the developer.
- slotThe's fork continues the work towards version 2 of RemarkableLamyEraser. This features a configuration system to allow many different events to be triggered by a wide variety of button click patterns. These events are triggered by simulating touch events on the relevant UI elements on the tablet screen. This makes it sensitive to whether the device is in left-handed mode or landscape mode. It is also vulnerable to changes to the UI in new versions of the reMarkable software.
- remarkable-stylus provides similar capabilites for users of the remarkable-hacks modified UI.
Copyright 2023-2024 Robert Schroll
Copyright 2021-2023 Isaac Wisdom
RMStylusButton is released under the GPLv3. See LICENSE for details.