flashless — flash-free colour pens for the reMarkable Paper Pro

What it is

On firmware 3.26.0.68 the Paper Pro draws colour pen strokes with a grey "live" preview, then — on the stroke and again about a second after you lift the pen — repaints the whole stroke area in a hard refresh to bring the colour in. That repaint is the flash: a jarring black-and-white blink every time you write in colour.

The 3.28 beta changed this so colour rides the normal partial refresh and the flash disappears. flashless backports that behaviour to 3.26.0.68. Your colour strokes — ballpoint, fineliner, calligraphy, and the shader tool — now render inline in their real colour and no longer trigger the refresh, both while you draw and on the delayed pen-up pass. Black and greyscale are left exactly as they were.

It is a runtime, in-memory patch of the running app — not a firmware flash and not an on-screen UI change. Nothing on disk is modified, and removing it is one command.

Features

• No draw flash — colour pen segments are rendered inline in their final colour as you write, instead of grey-then-repaint.
• No pen-up flash — the delayed (~1s) full re-render that colour strokes triggered after pen-up is suppressed, so the colour simply stays.
• Colour pens covered — ballpoint, fineliner, calligraphy, and the shader tool, in every colour.
• Black & greyscale untouched — mono strokes keep stock behaviour exactly; only colour is changed.
• Signature-checked & self-disabling — it verifies the exact firmware build before patching anything and does nothing on any other version (see caveats).
• Private — no network, no telemetry, no state file beyond a tiny flag.
• Instantly reversible — delete the extension and restart; you are back to stock.

Pairs with laserPen

If you use our laserPen product, the red laser stroke is a shader stroke — so with flashless installed, laser strokes draw and auto-erase flash-free too. The two are independent products; buy either alone, or both for a completely flash-free red-pointer experience.

Requirements

• reMarkable Paper Pro, firmware 3.26.0.68. Built and binary-pinned for firmware 3.26.0.68 exactly — see caveats.
• xovi with the extensions.d mechanism (free; links in the README). No other paid item required. flashless does not require freeColour.

Install

Copy one extension to the device and run the included enable script (it restarts xochitl the xovi-safe way and verifies the patch loaded). The exact commands, plus an inert "deploy first, enable later" path and a one-line SSH recovery, are in the README. Uninstall = delete the extension and the flag, restart. No system files are modified on disk.

Honest caveats

• Firmware 3.26.0.68 exactly. This is a binary detour pinned to that build of xochitl. It signature-checks the exact build before patching and aborts (does nothing) on any mismatch, so on any other firmware it loads completely inert and changes nothing — but it only does anything on 3.26.0.68. After a firmware update it must be re-pinned; updates are best-effort.
• It patches the running app in memory. This is a runtime binary detour, which is more invasive than a UI (qmldiff) tweak — which is exactly why it signature-checks the build first and why rollback is instant. It ships no reMarkable software, modifies no file on disk, and operates only on the copy of xochitl already running on your device.
• The shader tool renders "direct". Because the pen-up repaint is suppressed, the translucent shader stroke renders on the pen path directly rather than through its usual blend/refresh pass. For a solid-colour shader line this is what you want (that is the whole point); just note the render path differs from stock.
• Reversible. Delete redFlashless.so + the flag and restart xochitl the xovi-safe way and you are back to stock. The README includes the one-line SSH recovery should anything ever misbehave.