Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

#201

Post by benhurmarcel » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

pabue wrote: post #2

Haxplore is a little web app I created because I didn't like to click around the HN interface to read submission and discussions. I also wanted to experiment with different ways of implementing keyboard control in web apps and HN seemed like the perfect test subject. So maybe it's useful for some of you too. The most important features are: - Intuitive keyboard control - Link detection in comments with hotkeys to ope…

This is amazing, thanks!

Personally I am a fan of scanning over threads on https://hckrnews.com/ , filtering by "Top 20" or "50%", and opening interesting ones in a new tab. It especially helps to only go through the titles I haven't seen yet.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

#202

Post by gus_massa » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

pabue wrote: post #130

gus_massa wrote: post #5

It looks nice. I like to use the mouse anyway. Each post has the number of comments, something like " 123 comments -> " Can you make the number of comments and the arrow clickable? Also, the " " inside each post. It I'm reading a comment, the author and " open " should be clickable too. I didn't understand what " open " means, perhaps change it to " open in HN ".

Thanks. I'll think about making some elements clickable. But if some are clickable and some are not it might be even more confusing if non of the elements are clickable. So I'm not sure if it's a good idea. I'll consider changing it to "Open in HN". It is more clear about what it does but it's also longer and maybe a bit redundant.

As I said, I like to use the mouse. Just make everything clickable :) .

Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

#203

Post by Arnavion » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

lopis wrote: post #53

jccalhoun wrote: post #19

"We're sorry but Haxplore doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue." well that certainly is a twist...

It's a HN client with keyboard navigation. Not sure what you expect.

How would they have expected anything when that's all the page and the title of the submission say?

Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

#204

Post by joeframbach » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

pabue wrote: post #2

Haxplore is a little web app I created because I didn't like to click around the HN interface to read submission and discussions. I also wanted to experiment with different ways of implementing keyboard control in web apps and HN seemed like the perfect test subject. So maybe it's useful for some of you too. The most important features are: - Intuitive keyboard control - Link detection in comments with hotkeys to ope…

> Intuitive keyboard control

Can you expand on that? What were your references when choosing these key commands? Everything else I use chose `?` as the help key. My macbook doesn't even _have_ an `ALT` key...

Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

#205

Post by IncRnd » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

pabue wrote: post #2

Haxplore is a little web app I created because I didn't like to click around the HN interface to read submission and discussions. I also wanted to experiment with different ways of implementing keyboard control in web apps and HN seemed like the perfect test subject. So maybe it's useful for some of you too. The most important features are: - Intuitive keyboard control - Link detection in comments with hotkeys to ope…

It looks good! Thank you for creating this. Just one thing - I visit hn.com with js disabled, but your website requires js to function. For that reason alone I will stay with hn. I don't mean to come across as ungrateful, because I do not mean for my comment to appear that way. Thank you for sharing!

Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

#206

Post by pabue » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

IncRnd wrote: post #205

pabue wrote: post #2

Haxplore is a little web app I created because I didn't like to click around the HN interface to read submission and discussions. I also wanted to experiment with different ways of implementing keyboard control in web apps and HN seemed like the perfect test subject. So maybe it's useful for some of you too. The most important features are: - Intuitive keyboard control - Link detection in comments with hotkeys to ope…

It looks good! Thank you for creating this. Just one thing - I visit hn.com with js disabled, but your website requires js to function. For that reason alone I will stay with hn. I don't mean to come across as ungrateful, because I do not mean for my comment to appear that way. Thank you for sharing!

Thank you! That's totally fine.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

#207

Post by dstroot » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

pabue wrote: post #2

Haxplore is a little web app I created because I didn't like to click around the HN interface to read submission and discussions. I also wanted to experiment with different ways of implementing keyboard control in web apps and HN seemed like the perfect test subject. So maybe it's useful for some of you too. The most important features are: - Intuitive keyboard control - Link detection in comments with hotkeys to ope…

Vue + Tailwindcss?

Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

#208

Post by stephencoyner » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

Very cool! Nice work.

One thing I noticed on mobile is that I try to tap on the up and down arrows quickly to search between comments, which is often misinterpreted as a double tap in the browser and it zooms in.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

#209

Post by pabue » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

joeframbach wrote: post #204

pabue wrote: post #2

Haxplore is a little web app I created because I didn't like to click around the HN interface to read submission and discussions. I also wanted to experiment with different ways of implementing keyboard control in web apps and HN seemed like the perfect test subject. So maybe it's useful for some of you too. The most important features are: - Intuitive keyboard control - Link detection in comments with hotkeys to ope…

> Intuitive keyboard control Can you expand on that? What were your references when choosing these key commands? Everything else I use chose `?` as the help key. My macbook doesn't even _have_ an `ALT` key...

With that I mean the navigation through the submissions and comments via the arrow keys not the actual hotkeys or key combinations. The alt+h was a bad choice and will be switched to '?' in the next update.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

#210

Post by spiralx » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 11:24 PM UTC

pabue wrote: post #127

umvi wrote: post #106

This was surprisingly pleasant to use. Such intuitive controls and sane default behaviors. Usually HN clones are a dime a dozen, but this one is a cut above for sure. The only thing keeping me from using this full time is the information density. On normal HN I see the top 30 links all at once. On this one I only see the top 11 links before I have to scroll. I think a "high info density mode" where I could see the to…

Wow, that's so nice to hear. Thank you! That's actually a great idea. If you say "high density", do you mean just less whitespace/spacing or should stuff like the upvotes, author and date be completely removed from the initial element?

I like the font and spacing a lot, I'm always writing user styles to make sites (especially HN and Reddit) comfortable to read for more than a minute or two.

OTOH there's between 235px and 325px of height before the first comment under the parent story/comment, which is somewhere between 1/4 and a 1/3 of the entire available height. The Back and Open keyboard hints could be moved elsewhere or the empty space up top could just be shrunk. And why isn't Toggle Full Post with Back and Open, either all at the top or all in the parent?

Similarly having the "By pabue" on its own line (instead of inline with the controls below it) takes up a lot of room, and the least clear part of the UI is the comment author.

It's also not obvious where you are in a list of comments, having a minimap might be nice and quite fun to develop! And being able to go forward (and back) a page would also be nice. It's a nifty project though, good work :)