If you are already using the extension, you can see the "[op]" beside my username too! ;)
There are many extensions out there that add quite a few features to Hacker News, but they also always do one thing, which I have realised, is a slippery slope: changing the minimalistic design and style of Hacker News.
I created this extension with one thing in mind: I am NOT going to mess around with the overall design or style of Hacker News. It's sacrosanct.
There are quite a few feature additions and interface tweaks that are implemented, a few of the important ones being:
* Reply to a comment or edit/delete your comment without leaving the page (do it inline)
* Navigate through items and comments using your keyboard (vim keybindings)
* Sort/hide stories and auto-refresh periodically
...and many, many more. The GitHub README details all of them.
The extension is available on both Chrome and Firefox. Hope you all enjoy it!
> I created this extension with one thing in mind: I am NOT going to mess around with the overall design or style of Hacker News. It's sacrosanct.
I wish you would do something about the voting buttons and the expand/collapse buttons. They're way too tiny and way too close to other elements in the default scheme used by HN. This is a big deficiency I see with the default HN interface, which makes it less usable as well as less accessible.
Edit: I also see a 3/28 counter and a spinning icon on the top left of the page that doesn't change regardless of which post I'm browsing. Sometimes it disappears if I navigate to another post or page, but it looks like it starts with 0/28 for every post. [This is on Brave right now; no issues with connectivity or connection speed; dropdown menu from the username works.]
Ha, I made an extension with the same idea as OP to solve just the problem you mention - at least on devices with touch screens (I'm using it on Firefox for Android).
For expand/collapse, one of the very few things I've liked about "new" Reddit is being able to click the indent bar alongside comments to show/collapse. Something like that in this for HN would be helpful.
The “click on the indent bar to show/collapse” on reddit was something unintuitive for me initially. Moving from desktop where there is a clear arrow icon for that, I searched online on how to do this in the interface without the triangles. :)
Hey, regarding your update, could you create an issue on GitHub? It'll be easier to discuss it there.
The counter "counts" the feature that have been loaded. It looks like you are stuck on the "highlight-unread-comments" feature. Could you open the console and check for error messages there?
Unfortunately for whatever reason firebaseio.com (which gets called by your extension) is blocked in my country[0]. As a result, this extension doesn't work on my end. But bravo for this! I personally very much liked the highlighted unread comments and being able to reply without living the page. The hovering thing bothers a bit tho[1].
[0]: Then again, CloudFlare gives me an access denied upon opening hn.algolia.com as well.
[1]: Interestingly, the extension suggests "show-user-info-on-hover" to be disabled!
This is rather strange. Which country are you in, may I ask? Also, doesn't this hamper with many other websites you might visit that depend on Firebase?
Currently I'm located in Iran, and yes, many websites that depend on Firebase get automatically blocked (the same goes for medium.com). On top of that, many other websites decide not to provide service to Iran in the first place, so...
That's unfortunate. Also just a small clarification: I don't recommend disabling the "show-user-info-on-hover" feature, it's just there as an example :P
Maybe a stupid question, but why is the extension even talking to Firebase? Skimming the feature list, all of these look like something that should work without connecting anywhere else but HN itself.
Cool, I made one with the exact same principles to scratch a personal itch - inline reply is something I was hoping to add some time.
Anyway, I'd love to be able to just use someone else's extension :) Mine makes up/downvote and collapsing buttons easier to hit on mobile, links to parent/root comments, and rewrites Google AMP links to regular links. It's open source, so feel free to incorporate those features in yours: https://gitlab.com/vincenttunru/sihn
Thank you! The #1 feature that is getting me to install is 'Next comment with same indentation and parent'. I like to skip a lot of the nested replies on un-interesting top level comments.
Interesting, since this is one of the feature that I had abandoned. I thought that such a feature would needlessly be a bit too aggressive if you get what I am saying.
Nevertheless, in the "custom styles" input in the popup, you enter the following to blur out all points, comments etc:
He is saying you can already do what you want to do. His plug-ins let you add custom styles. The place where the custom styles go is inside a text box that appears when you click on the plug-in's icon.
Just copy the style he provides above, paste it in the custom style field, and it will blur the "integer counts" just like you asked!
I certainly have! I've tried a few color combinations and themes, but nothing ever fits right. You can create an feature request on GitHub so others can contribute on this idea too :)
Yup, I've used that extension briefly in the past. It certainly provided nice features, but as with other similar extensions, it also altered the style quite a bit, which I wasn't too fond of.
I use HNES, but the only feature in it I care about is tagging users. I very much wish I could turn off all of the other features, especially its custom styles. If you were to add the ability to tag users to RHN, I'd be one happy camper!
I have not installed yet, but may I suggest one feature, assuming it does not exist yet?
Hide Posts Above
It hides all posts in the feed above the selected post.
This is a feature in the reddit iOS Apollo app. This not only makes the site less stale, but also might help alleviate “frontpage upvote bias” where great items that are not on the first couple pages don’t get many views and upvotes.
Hi! It be great if you could elaborate on the implementation of this feature. I don't currently have an iOS device to see the feature in the. Better still, it'd be also great if you could submit a feature request on GitHub so it helps me to track the issues.
This is fairly common for extensions to be on Chrome/Firefox but not Safari, unfortunately. Firefox's WebExtension APIs are mostly code-compatible with the extension API supported by Google Chrome and Opera, with a few exceptions [1].
Safari uses its own Safari Extensions JS, so while it may be possible to share some resources (e.g. images, HTML content), the js work needs to be undertaken as a separate development project, unless you use/build a polyfill.
Safari has traditionally used a different extension API, which coupled with this smaller adoption has hindered the progress of extensions in the platform. A recent change to an app extension model has hurt the ecosystem even more, as it killed a significant portion of the already few extensions that used to exist.
We have a browser extension that we use for moderation. A few of the features here overlap surprisingly with what that one does. One of these years I want to open-source it, but I need to factor out the moderation-only features, which is one of those tasks that never makes it to the top of the stack.
I wonder... at one point I wrote an extension (for the moderators) which had the ability to essentially follow users. Think of it as a news feed for HN.
Really wish I could make that open source if no one is using it lol I use it personally to follow people on HN which post interesting comments (still works after 4 years with no edits)
We've considered it, but it's way more Javascript than we're comfortable introducing by default. (Actually it's Arc compiled to JS, another piece of software I'd like to publish someday.) Most likely, we'd make it an option you could turn on in your profile, so you'd get the functionality without having to install an extension.
(If by folding you mean collapsing comments, that was implemented separately, as part of HN proper.)
This is going to sound like nitpicking but is there a way that you could avoid the flicker on the listing page?
Perhaps adding the <div> on load with a static height and then filling it with the filters? Another option could be to allow the user to show / hide the bar and remember the setting. That way, one could open it when needed only and it wouldn't flicker on every load.
Same thing for the "toggle all comments" button in a thread.
I get nauseous with such flickers. I really like this extension but won't be able to use it unless this changes.
Same here, this is my go-to for Hacker News content now. But of course it's only a curator, it doesn't offer anything like what this refined-hacker-news project does.
Side note if author/host is reading: can you redirect HTTP to HTTPS? :)
I like it so far, but J to navigate down and K to navigate up is not intuitive at all. It should be flipped to match our Left-to-Right-Top-to-Bottom understanding of layouts
When I learned HJKL, I used the following mnemonic: The J key (like the F key) has a little bump at the bottom to indicate the resting position for the index fingers in 10-finger writing. Since the bump is at the lower edge of the J key, that means that J goes down.
This is very very nice! May I ask what language did you code this in? Is it JS? Or just how did you get started? Yeah I'm just an average Joe who is getting started and loves learning new stuff. Hopefully that not too intrusive, thanks.
Since this is a browser extension, it's almost completely written in JavaScript only. You can check the entire code on the GitHub repo itself! Feel free to email me anytime :)
This is wonderful work, and done in a respectful way that doesn't get in the way of the original site while adding quite a lot of really useful stuff. Great job with this. Now if only we could get HN to merge this into core...
I noticed that the extension is inspired by Sindresorhus. I think he's totally nailed the way to architect and structure extensions now. Especially if you look up a lot of guides on how to build extensions, they really don't tell you anything about how to include npm packages, or distribute the extension in an automated way. Refined github does all of this in a really clear way that, I think, works very well. I recently used it's structure to rewrite an extension of mine and it helped so much.
I've been using HackerNew [0] for years now (probably 5+) and love it. It does change the style a little bit but I quite enjoy it. It appears to be missing in the chrome store right now though for some reason.
My prayers have been answered. Thank you so much for adding keyboard shortcuts to HN. It was getting to the point where I had a project on the roadmap to build an API application myself. Thank you so much!
Great job. What I miss is weekly email roundup of comments made by people I like on HN. Its interesting that you cannot "follow" people on HN just to specifically read their comments.
Yeah, that's a backend issue, it's how Hacker News handles the forms after they have been submitted. Nevertheless I will look into this, please consider creating an issue on the GitHub repo too! :)
Could somebody please explain the selection of required permissions to me? For example, why does it need: "Access browsing history", "Access browser tabs"?
To "hide read stories", the extension needs to check whether the link has been opened in the past, ie, if it is present in the history.
To open links in new tabs, but in the background, and to communicate between the popup and active instances of Hacker News, the extension requires the "tabs" permission.
All code is completely open-sourced on the GitHub repository, too!
I always want the ability to skip the entire thread I'm currently viewing (as opposed to collapse the sub-thread I'm currently viewing). The official Reddit iOS app does this with a floating button, for example.
Hey, could you elaborate a little more on "skipping the entire thread"? I don't quite understand. Please consider creating a feature request in the GitHub repo's issue, it'll allow me to track the issues better. Thanks!
You can hide the currently highlighted item by pressing shift + H. Currently, there is no way to "hide all". I believe this is a common request among many, so it'd be great if you could create a feature request on GitHub for the same so that it'll be easier to track issues. Thanks
Seems fairly simple to do! To track these feature requests, it'd be great if you could open an issue on the GitHub repository, so that we can discuss it there too! Thanks :)
Alternately, perhaps you could just add a class to each post with its domain name. That way the user can custom style (or hide completely) his or her chosen domains with userContent.css or an extension like Stylish.
If you are already using the extension, you can see the "[op]" beside my username too! ;)
There are many extensions out there that add quite a few features to Hacker News, but they also always do one thing, which I have realised, is a slippery slope: changing the minimalistic design and style of Hacker News.
I created this extension with one thing in mind: I am NOT going to mess around with the overall design or style of Hacker News. It's sacrosanct.
There are quite a few feature additions and interface tweaks that are implemented, a few of the important ones being:
* Reply to a comment or edit/delete your comment without leaving the page (do it inline)
* Navigate through items and comments using your keyboard (vim keybindings)
* Sort/hide stories and auto-refresh periodically
...and many, many more. The GitHub README details all of them.
The extension is available on both Chrome and Firefox. Hope you all enjoy it!