17 ms·

Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist

594 points by pabue 5y ago

jack335 5y ago
That is really cool!
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you so much!
pabue 5y ago
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 open them directly - Better readbility and formatting of comments - Hotkeys for the most common actions - Ability to open stories or comments in an overlay for reading long texts
- davidcollantes 5y ago
  How do I read the comments?
  - pabue 5y ago
    You have to use your arrow keys, WASD or HJKL to navigate through the comments.
    - Noumenon72 5y ago
      I could not figure this out even after using the help dialog repeatedly, since I assumed "navigate" meant "scrolling up and down the page", and there were three shortcuts that actually mentioned comments.
      - qorrect 5y ago
        It's built for people who use the keyboard, your mouse will not help you here.
- egeozcan 5y ago
  Please work on this more, this is just such a pleasant interface! On the other hand, the criticism here in HN is also mostly correct. It should be more accessible, but definitely a great start!
  - pabue 5y ago
    Thank you very much! Got great feedback so far, so I'm definitely gonna work on it and try to improve the experience.
    - qorrect 5y ago
      I love the keyboard interface please don't listen to anyone trying to change that part :).
      - pabue 5y ago
        Don't worry, I will definitely not change anything about the keyboard control part. You have my word! ;)
- user207 5y ago
  brilliant work, please do twitter next very addicting
  - pabue 5y ago
    Thank you! That's funny, when I started this project I actually wanted to build it for HN, Reddit and Twitter, but couldn"t find the time for it and scrapped that idea. Guess I should revisit that decision.
  - PKop 5y ago
    Twitter already has keyboard navigation
- snsr 5y ago
  The web page doesn’t scroll.
  - pabue 5y ago
    This is intentional. You have to use your arrow keys, WASD or HJKL to navigate.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - john-doe 5y ago
      Mixed with keyboard tabbing, it gets really confusing.
      - pabue 5y ago
        This is true. I recommend to not use keyboard tabbing while navigating throught the comments. Makes it a lot less confusing and you still do everything.
    - andrewl-hn 5y ago
      However, it's impossible to read longer comments this way. This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28705415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28705415 in this very thread is too long to fit in my browser window, which is maximized on my 16" laptop. So far I'm just pressing O, but it still takes time. A scroll for long comments would be really welcomed. Other than that, it's a very cool UI! I can see using it full-time and press O only when I want to reply. Actually, I just did :D
      - pabue 5y ago
        You can actually press spacebar to open a comment inside a modal where you can scroll. Wow, thank you very much! :D
- kimusan 5y ago
  I like the design - too bad that HN does not allow for you to add comment support. That would make it perfect
  - exikyut 5y ago
    I was just thinking about this myself. It would be so awesome to add something like OAuth2! But then I realized, this would break the subtle cohesion of the current model. Everyone has to specifically come back to news.yc to comment. Everyone has to use the HN design. I do wonder if this is intentional, or at least strategic - because the current approach enforces a certain perspective when commenting that *perhaps* might be broken, or at least made much much harder to maintain, by the fragmentation induced from being able to run off and build totally alternative interfaces. It's just a thought. I'm not sure if this is just hot air.
    - Shared404 5y ago
      I've thought the same thing. Looking at reddit, whenever someone complains about degredation of discussion, somebody pops up and says "just use old.reddit.com". However, everyone else is still on new reddit, so even if you increase the quality of your submissions, the overall quality still drops.
      - deaddodo 5y ago
        I would use the new reddit interface specifically if they re-enabled the old comment experience. The current one is terrible.
    - vxNsr 5y ago
      My understanding is it’s an attempt at spam reduction. By not providing an API for commenting they make it harder for spammers.
    - archon810 5y ago
      I'm able to add comments using my current unofficial Android app. These apps just work around the requirement by issuing some sort of HTTP requests similar to the site itself.
- exikyut 5y ago
  Intitial impression: "oookay [click] let's have a look let's see how badly broken *this* HN frontend i--ooh. Oh, okay. Wow this is nice!" And it truly is. There's something this honestly nails. But after using it for few moments, I was able to crystallize what I perceived was "wrong" with the design: the mechanic of combining locality with spatiality means I completely lose sight of the bigger picture. I have a really bad memory and attention span, so I depend on constantly reading cues/senses of scale from my environment. As in, they need to be constantly there. (For example, the first thing I'd do if I ever used a Mac was make the scrollbars permanently visible.) With this UI, the immediate and global focus (the only focus) is on the comment I'm reading right now. Paradoxically, the clear intuition is that this would reduce distraction and increase focus, but (at least for me) by only presenting individual details I cannot establish and maintain orientation about how big a thread is, the structure of it (a few large mega-subthreads, or subthread islands, or hundreds of upvotes but only like 15 total comments), etc. I tend to take full advantage of scroooooling through and cherry-picking comments to read at random. I've long dreamed of solutions that provide a rigid framework that ensure I read every comment, but I've kind of accepted that such approaches just don't work in practice; they require a tremendous amount of discipline to use (almost like grammar-proofreading a book). A UI that has me consider every single comment as globally important ("it's the only thing on the screen at this exact moment"), both a) maxes out my attention span very quickly and b) feeds me a non-representative, breadth-first view of the discussion, because I find there's a nontrivial effort associated with needing to hit the right arrow key to expand the comments: I Have No Idea How Many Subcomments Are Hiding In There nO I aM NoT GoInG iN ThErE ThAt iS ScArY. For whatever reason (???) it's physiologically easier to just keep hitting Down instead. This is honestly novel and interesting - and because of how well-executed this is, I can say that if you were to ever to consider tackling global orientation (I'm imagining spotlight/expose type zooming here, but I strongly suspect that would be just as disorientating as not being able to vaguely internalize the bigger picture at all), I would be very interested to see.
  - ydant 5y ago
    Agreed with pretty much everything here. It's a nice UI, looks good, is smooth, well done overall. However, it doesn't fit how I read HN or Reddit - I tend to scan and be drawn to keywords and visually interesting parts of the thread. This type of UI turns the comments into a TODO list of indeterminate length.
- bennyp101 5y ago
  I like this! I use a tiling WM, so I can have this open in a window (or scratchpad) that is shrunk to the width of your column, and just shoot over to it, and move around nice and easily! Two things: - alt + h doesn't open the Help for me, it opens the actual help menu in Firefox. - It would be nice to mark the entries as 'read' and show if more comments have happened since reading Edit: Wrapping it in a small Tauri app would be cool, then it gets rid of the bookmarks and stuff I have at the top :D
  - pabue 5y ago
    Thank you for liking it :D 1. The alt+h hotkey will be probably be replaced by "?". That should fix this. 2.1 That's a pretty cool idea. Would you want the "mark as read" part to happen automatically or manually? 2.2 Showing new/unread comments is also a cool idea but it will increase the amount of requests to the HN api. However I'm gonna look into it. Wrapping it in a Tauri might be cool, because I actually wanted to try that. But I think the first step would be to make it a PWA, so you can install it without downloading anything. Thank you for the feeback!
    - kbenson 5y ago
      > Showing new/unread comments is also a cool idea but it will increase the amount of requests to the HN api. However I'm gonna look into it. At the simplest level LocalStorage or equivalent keyed on the submission id with a prior comment count to be compared with the new comment count would be sufficient. If it had a time of hast check as well, highlighting new comments would also be easy. I'm not sure about other people, but thise are really the two things I care about most when trying to keep up with a discussion (are there new comments, and which are they).
      - mkl 5y ago
        Storing view time would make things easy, but might break on subthreads. You can probably just store all the comment ids in LocalStorage, and highlight comments that aren't in that set before putting them in there (or maybe put them in there only when scrolled to/past).
- ostenning 5y ago
  Really nice, bravo
  - pabue 5y ago
    Thank you!
- dionian 5y ago
  Cool UI. nice job
- hoofedear 5y ago
  Can’t wait to try this when I get home!
- zabil 5y ago
  Great work, especially the comment navigation. I find it much easier to view the comment threads and scan top level comments.
- avaku 5y ago
  Reading this post on Haxplore itself is even better :)
- mrmattyboy 5y ago
  This is awesome!! :) One tiny thing (though everyone's tiny suggestions sure add up :D ) (aside from the alt-h not working in firefox)... It would be awesome if hitting space or something on a selected post would open it in a iframe (or panel) in the middle of the screen. Then be able to up-arrow/down-array (or PGUP/PGDOWN) through the page and escape out of it. This would mean you can quickly skim an article without leaving the app! But, well done, it's absolutely wicked :D
  - seFausto 5y ago
    I completely agree on the iframe. After opening a link I keep trying to go back by pressing the left arrow. Pressing Ctrl+W is not to bad to close the tab though.
    - mrmattyboy 5y ago
      Indeed, not too bad and this is what I did, but certainly not immediately natural, as you have to rely on the browser's tab history (i.e. you closed this tab, redirect user to previous tab), so wouldn't work if I starting viewing a HN post, then continued work (that I should have been originally doing) then go back to the post, close it and then browser redirects me back to the 'work' tab that I came back from..... if you see what I mean. Tab history: * Expected: HN client -> website from post -(ctrl+w)-> HN client vs: * HN Client -> HN post website -(switch tab)-> real work work tab -(switch back)-> HN post website -(ctrl+w)-> real work tab :( )* *Think I opened a bracket somewhere in the comment and haven't closed it
  - pabue 5y ago
    Thank you! I'm definitely not complaining about the amount of feedback. It's really amazing. That really is a great idea. One issue might be that not every site allows being shown in an iframe because they block that functionality. But I'm gonna look into it!
    - mrmattyboy 5y ago
      yeh, I can imagine that feature spiralling in complexity (up to pre-checking server-side if they provide CSP/Frame headers, then outright download and proxy the page :P ) Yeh, I could maybe image a 'p' button that would show a preview, that would just be hit-and-miss... I wonder what percentage of submissions on hacker news actively disallow iframes... like actual blog posts and not things like 'new apple product' from Apple's website :wondering:
- Mooty 5y ago
  Would love to see a PWA from this, as most I've found are basically ugly. Congrats for the work done. PS : Please use another color scheme or put a dark mode somehow, my wife will kill me if I open the app at night.
  - pabue 5y ago
    Thank you. I will add some basic PWA functionality soon. Oh, and I just addeda dark theme. Just to keep you alive. ;) It should be applied automatically, but you can also change it in the settings.
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  Really cool! My $0.02: I wish this looked more like hacker news: IE, same colors, same fonts, same text size. I've been using Hacker News for so long that its look and feel are part of its queues. Different colors / fonts just gives the same content a different feel. I'm torn on how you display comments. One thing that I don't like in Hacker News is that a top-level comment with a lot of replies ends up pushing other top-level comments too far in the page. Your approach, though, is the polar opposite: Never show replies until I select a comment and push ->. Perhaps show a few of the replies with smaller text?
  - filoleg 5y ago
    wow, I've never even thought of such a simple change until I've read your reply (all comments collapsed by default as opposed to expanded by default), but I want it really badly now. Many HN apps and browser extension by now have an easy way to to collapse comments (usually by clicking an icon next to the comment or tapping on the comment on touchscreens), but I don't think I've seen one yet where collapsed by default is an option. P.S. And now that I am thinking more about it, apps and extensions (at least the ones i've used so far) don't even have the true "collapsing" function (or maybe I just wasn't aware of where it is buried in the settings, so please let me know if I am wrong here). When you try to collapse on Refined HN (ff/chrome extension) or HACK (iOS app), it doesn't hide all child comments and then keeps the root comment (just listed those two extensions/apps as an example, because those are the two I personally use). It hides the content of all comments including the root comment that you clicked, but it leaves a small indicator that there is a collapsed comment, basically just the username and the number of comments. To this point, I have a question to everyone. If there is an HN app for iOS that anyone can genuinely recommend that has a feature when you collapse a comment, it still shows the one you clicked "collapse" on but hides all child comments (as opposed to the text content of the root comment you collapsed being hidden as well), please post them.
    - behnamoh 5y ago
      Reading the comments on Haxplore using Haxplore is so meta: https://imgur.com/a/v4tbfqP https://imgur.com/a/v4tbfqP
- albert_e 5y ago
  idea: can you pre-fetch just the top comment for each post? Currently ..clicking on right arrow always shows the "loading" animation for 0.5-1 sec. Instead, if we readily show the top comment instantly and then lazy-load the rest, it will drastically improve the UX. User will perceive near zero wait time that way. My 2 cents
  - pabue 5y ago
    Thanks, that's a pretty good idea. I will probably add this in the future, but so far everyone seems to be okay with the performance/speed.
- behnamoh 5y ago
  It's very sleek, responsive, and friendly! Kudos! Please don't let it die like many other Show HNs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682173
  - pabue 5y ago
    Thank you! I will definitely keep working on it. If you are interested you can always take a look at the changelog: https://haxplore.sleekplan.app/changelog https://haxplore.sleekplan.app/changelog
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  This is amazing, thanks! Personally I am a fan of scanning over threads on https://hckrnews.com/ 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.
- joeframbach 5y ago
  > 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...
  - pabue 5y ago
    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.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  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!
  - pabue 5y ago
    Thank you! That's totally fine.
- dstroot 5y ago
  Vue + Tailwindcss?
  - pabue 5y ago
    Correct.
- charbuff 5y ago
  I miss a tiny thing: seeing when each comment was created.
  - pabue 5y ago
    Good catch, this will be added in the next update.
- seFausto 5y ago
  I really like it! I'll use it as my default HN client for a while, see how it goes. This app makes me focus more on the content than regular scrolling HN.
  - pabue 5y ago
    I'm really glad to hear that. Heads up, there will a big update in the next few days.
- birksherty 5y ago
  I really prefer that it shows only the top level comments by default, which can be expanded with a simple key. Overall fantastic experience. I just have two suggestions. Add a dark theme and options to show only top 10/top 20/all just like hckrnews.com which helps to keep track of things and not miss important stories on busy days.
- thameera 5y ago
  Love this, and hope you continue the development. Feature request: Ability to open an HN URL in Haxplore.
drKarl 5y ago
Cool idea, but not very Mobile friendly
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you. And yeah it does not really work on mobile, but to be fair it's not supposed to. I only spend a few minutes on it to make it somewhat useable. As far as I know here are many other HN clones that improve the mobile experience, so I focused solely on building something cool for desktop/keyboard users.
  - stavros 5y ago
    Deciding that it's not meant for mobile is a perfectly acceptable position to take, in my opinion.
    - egeozcan 5y ago
      Yes! To the UI developers: Please don't let optimizing for a single platform become a lost art. Not saying cross-platform should not be done or anything like that, but using an application that's 100% tailored to my device is nice to experience, from time to time.
gus_massa 5y ago
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 "<- Back" 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".
- pabue 5y ago
  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.
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    As I said, I like to use the mouse. Just make everything clickable :) .
soheil 5y ago
Why are you blurring the previous row? Why are you disabling scrolling? These are hostile to the user.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Scrolling is disabled because this is not a website for mouse control, it's explicitly made for keyboards. You can notice this by the application not having any mouse controls at all, no links and so on. It's not user hostile if the goal is keyboard controls.
  - soheil 5y ago
    There is no reason to disable scrolling even if the primary interactions are supposed to happen with keyboard. I don’t want to remember which websites allow scrolling and which don’t.
    - vonadz 5y ago
      I'd say there is a point. With disabled scrolling you can guarantee that the "cursor" will always be on the screen. With scrolling enabled, you could out scroll the selection, making for worse UI experience. I'm also not a fan of blurring the previous article, but I guess they chose to do it to put focus on your current selection.
  - pritambarhate 5y ago
    It's an informative website. This is bad UX for an informative site. Sure it can support keyboard shortcuts for additional fast access. It will be better for power users. But disabling scrolling with mouse and touchpad is hostile and counter productive to the casual users who might be interested in the content.
    - vonadz 5y ago
      It appears the whole point of this site is the keyboard navigation. If you don't like it, just use Hacker News.
yoavm 5y ago
I loved the keyboard navigation. Alt+H opens Firefox's Help menu for me however. I wanted to try using it for a while, but then I wanted to comment here, and well, it seems like commenting still has to be done from the normal interface... :)
WithinReason 5y ago
I particularly like the response time (low latency). It's underappreciated in web design.
- pabue 5y ago
  That was definitely an important aspect while building it. I'm also glad the HN api is so damn fast.
agumonkey 5y ago
I love these ergonomics. Thanks for keyboard lovers like me.
jb1991 5y ago
Cool, but I find just scrolling the page with the MBP trackpad to be much easier for getting a feel for the discussion.
kuu 5y ago
First of all, congratulations on shipping it! It's pretty cool. Some feelings I had while using it, just in case it's useful to you: - To me is a bit strange than when I'm focused on comments, by pressing Enter it opens the URL of the article (that it's not my focus right now). - Also I would like to add comments, but I think in this version is still not possible. - As others mention, it wouldn't hurt that those actions can be both done by mouse and keys (or maybe the title of the submission should be "HN with keyboard") I like the colors and the blur effect, nice touch :)
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you very much! 1. In get why that might be a bit confusing. The problem is, you can't focus the article/post after opening the comments, so you would have to go back in order to open the link. I didn't find a better solution at the time, so I just left it like this. Maybe I just have to think a bit harder ;) 2. I mostly just read discussions that's why I didn't even consider a comment feature. But I'm definitely gonna look into that and see if it's possible. 3. Might be a good idea. I actually had a mouse/keyboard switch at some point but removed it because it was a bit buggy and confusing. Maybe I should rethink that. Thanks for your feedback!
jccalhoun 5y ago
"We're sorry but Haxplore doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue." well that certainly is a twist...
- lopis 5y ago
  It's a HN client with keyboard navigation. Not sure what you expect.
  - Arnavion 5y ago
    How would they have expected anything when that's all the page and the title of the submission say?
  - ajdude 5y ago
    As someone who browses the internet by default without any JavaScript enabled, I also find it jarring when websites do this. I understand that some webapps absolutely need JavaScript to function, but I wish it was handled with a bit more tact than a completely blank page displaying a single sentence asking me to enable it. I'm not calling out op, twitter and quora do this too.
pramodbiligiri 5y ago
This is great! For stories with 100s of comments it's nice to start browsing from a collapsed view of top-level comments. - Why is the Comments count shown only for the highlighted story? - On Firefox Windows, pressing the Enter key on an item triggers a popup warning at the top of the page. Took me a few tries to notice what was going on. - Alt + H triggers the Firefox Help menu for me :| Can you change that shortcut key to "?" instead? GMail, Github etc use "?". - The green background for the comment text is a bit too dark. - Is it just me or is the comment text not showing paragraph breaks? - The zoom in transition when the comment text modal shows up just slows things down. If I'm going to load many comments in that view I'd rather it load instantly. Also, what's the purpose of this modal? There's a "Space -> Read" for the comment that I'm already reading. I don't get it.
- Aissen 5y ago
  Re: Alt+H ; it's the same for Alt+O on Firefox.
  - pabue 5y ago
    Thank you! Gonna fix that later.
- pabue 5y ago
  1. I initially wanted to display as little information as possbile to keep it clean and prevent clutter, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to show at least the comments count. 2. Oh, I didn't notice that. Might be caused by the way the new tab is opened. Gonna look into that, thanks. 3. Good catch, gonna change that. 4. Do mean contrast wise? 5. You're right, the spacing between paragraphs is missing. That will get fixed. 6. Yea, I will probably increase the speed of the transition to match the rest of the UI. The modal exists for reading longer comments. It's unnecessary for most, but during testing I found quite a lot of very long comments (especially in Ask HN) that didn't fit on the screen. Scrolling directly inside the comment felt weird, so I added the modal. It also increases the text size and makes it easier to read long paragraphs. Thank you very much for your feedback!
  - 5y ago
jaxx75 5y ago
If anyone likes this interface, I highly recommend Vimium on Chrome and Firefox.
jamespwilliams 5y ago
Looks good and works well. Browsing with Vimium is good enough for me though, and means I can reuse muscle memory to/from other sites.
plibither8 5y ago
This is really nice OP, love it! Reminds me of my own Chrome extension, Refined Hacker News [1], with almost identical keybindings built into the HN interface. Neat coincidence :) [1]: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news#on-items-and-comments https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news#on-items-a...
TimMeade 5y ago
I like it. It's strangely refreshing! I do agree the colors are a little odd. Might be the strangely part! :-)
- pabue 5y ago
  Thanks! What about the colors do you find odd? I didn't put that much thought into the color choices, so I'm really curious.
sz4kerto 5y ago
It's great. But. Can you please give me an option to just select the entry as if it was a 'normal' menu instead of scrolling the whole page and keeping the 'cursor' steady at the top?
- pabue 5y ago
  Thanks! This is something I initially tested during development but didn"t feel right for me, so I scrapped. But having an option to switch the mode might be a good idea.
BatteryMountain 5y ago
Well done, works perfectly on Firefox 92 on Fedora 34. The smooth animations & responsiveness to key-presses are spot on! Can we please have Dark Mode?
- blokeley 5y ago
  Yes, install Dark Reader https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/
  - BatteryMountain 5y ago
    Can confirm, plays well with darkreader.
crhutchins 5y ago
This looks great! The animations are smooth, and the details seem to load fast. How about you try a specific subreddit?
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you! I was actually thinking about adding support for reddit. Might add that in the future.
qwertox 5y ago
I'm surprised at how smooth this is and am really considering this as a replacement of the HN page for me. The only thing I'd love to have added would be an inline mode, where replies to comments are also shown on the top level of the comment section, but indented, just like it's on YC's HN. More things: - Always show comments count - Reloading a comment section should not bring you back to the front page (clear entire state).
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you, that is really nice to hear. I'm not sure about an inline mode because that would kind of defeat the initial purpose of this app. But, I did write it down and will see if there are others who would like this. There is now an option to always show the comments count. I'm currently working on exactly that issue. One of the next updates will add support for changes to the browser history and URL so you will be able to reload or share the URL at any point. You can check the changelog if you are interested: https://haxplore.sleekplan.app/changelog https://haxplore.sleekplan.app/changelog
FailMore 5y ago
Front end bug on mobile. As you down arrow the faded part at the top gets smaller and smaller. Chrome on Pixel
- pabue 5y ago
  Oh, good catch. Mobile is not really a priority right now, but I'm gonna take a look at it later.
jack_riminton 5y ago
Really nice, fancy doing a dark mode version? Also I didn't quite get how I was supposed to see comments
- pabue 5y ago
  Thanks, definitely gonna add dark mode soon! I was hoping the arrow would convey enough meaning but I guess it's too subtle. I'm curious, did you read the "How to..." at the start?
  - jack_riminton 5y ago
    Well, I 'thought' I'd read the the "How to"! Maybe it needs a small guided tour thing
    - pabue 5y ago
      A guided tour is a good idea. I thought about that too but figured it would be too much for an experiment like that. Maybe I was wrong.
a_c 5y ago
Love having more sites enabled with deterministic navigation! Unrelated, I love keeping my hands on home row, regardless the website I'm visiting with the help of browser plugin vimium. It allows you to navigate with hjkl, label links and opening them with t, quickly jumps to opened tab with o, etc
k__ 5y ago
press delete to hide, and I'm sold.
- pabue 5y ago
  That's a pretty cool idea. I'm gonna see what I can do. Thank you!
KrishnaAnaril 5y ago
Loved it. But I'm facing a couple of issues. 1. It's difficult to change menu without mouse. 2.Space for read not working in ask hn page.
tartuffe78 5y ago
It would be nice if there were a way for it to "remember" where I left off, or filter stories I've already scrolled past out of the list when I come back.
- pabue 5y ago
  That's a pretty cool idea. I'm gonna look into that. Thanks!
  - cheschire 5y ago
    Might be tough to implement with the display order changing. You’d need to find some way to hide or subdue via ID. But even then you still can’t leap down without looking for unread IDs. Seems like a tough one.
mtmail 5y ago
Can you add the URL to https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news ?
dkatz23238 5y ago
Wow this is really cool and well designed. Sorry for this simple question but what did you use to get the nice sliding like animation? Is that intentional or just a result of updating the currently selected article?
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you very much! Good question. The content part is actually moved left and right using CSS transforms. The sliding animation is just a result of adding a transition for this property. Hope this helps. Otherwise just ask ;)
bovermyer 5y ago
I adore this except for one thing - the infinite scroll. If you added paging, it'd be perfect.
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you. Paging is something I actually wanted to add at the beginning but then I tought it wouldn't be necessary for an experiment like that. I'm also not quite sure how it would look or work ui wise.
ktzar 5y ago
I'd just ask for a dark theme based on the browser's preferences.
- pabue 5y ago
  Definitely gonna add an optional dark mode soon!
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Wow, I just came from your interface to this comment. So I guess I'll reply here. What a trip. +1 for dark mode. But also, would you add a shortcut for the left hand for opening comments? I lost my right arm in a tractor accident, and pressing O is a bit annoying. Just kidding, but I do like the idea of R to reply.
thih9 5y ago
I’m impressed that it works on mobile too. I guess best ux is with a keyboard but still it’s nice to see what it’s about.
- pabue 5y ago
  In the beginning it was so bad on mobile that it was actually completely unusable. I think it's still not very good but at least it's somewhat usable. A keyboard is definitely the recommended input device. ;)
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    I immediately got that keyboard is the intended usage, but also was impressed it works on mobile at all. You obviously took care to consider it, and I wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t. Good job!
smallerfish 5y ago
Can you please avoid blurring the prior column (or at least the comment you came from)? It's useful to see context that way. Otherwise I think it's really good. Reddit should have aspired to something this well thought out. (I'd also like page up / page down.)
- salamander014 5y ago
  I agree. I like the idea of visualizing previous item in some way, maybe faded instead? Should give the same effect.
  - pabue 5y ago
    The previous item (or parent comment) is always visible in the white box on top/above the current comment. But it's quite easy overlooked because the change from the article/link to the comment is not very noticable.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Good point. On a large screen most of the space is wasted: a blurred column on the left and empty space on the right. This accounts for 2/3 of the of the space. Please use all of it :)
  - pabue 5y ago
    At some point during development you could actually see all the columns clearly and most of the screen space was used but it was very disorienting, at least for me. That's why I removed it. But I guess some people think differently, so maybe I'm gonna add an option for that.
    - gota 5y ago
      Seconding the ask to reduce the space dedicated to the previous focus level (left of screen)
- pabue 5y ago
cyberjunkie 5y ago
I love this. Every feed and comment based service should use this.
- pabue 5y ago
  Wow, thank you!
daveungerer 5y ago
It simply shows a loading animation for me. It raises "Error: No available storage method found" on line 2718 of localforage.js. This is Firefox 92 on Ubuntu 24.04.3. It works in Chrome, but I don't use it as my main browser. Spent a minute on it just to see the vim-style navigation, pretty cool. Hope the bug report helps!
- pabue 5y ago
  Oh, that should not happen. Thanks for the report, I'm gonna look into it.
croddin 5y ago
Great site! On iPhone, if you are tapping a button on the bottom rapidly, (like if you just double tap the down button) it triggers the page to zoom in. It looks like there is an easy css fix for that. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46167604/ios-html-disable-double-tap-to-zoom https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46167604/ios-html-disabl...
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you! For the compliment, the bug report and the fix. :D
throwoutway 5y ago
Bookmarked. I hope you continue working on it! The biggest hurdle for me would be to remember to go here instead of news.ycombinator.com though
- pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
  In your HN profile settings, change the top bar color (to something jarring/habit-breaking), as a reminder the next time you land here instead of there.
- pabue 5y ago
  I will definitely continue working on this. It's great to hear that people actually enjoy using it. I actually moved it to a separate domain, because I don"t think people will remember haxplore.pabue.co when they think about HN. You can now find it here: https://haxplore.com https://haxplore.com
cvs268 5y ago
Nice App. I was trying to create some web-UI like this to read my own dump of bookmarks/notes on various devices. What language/frameworks did you use for the web UI? Is the source available somewhere gitlab/github?
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you. I'm using Vue 2 and Javascript, because I actually started this project a while ago. I will probably upgrade it to Vue 3 and Typescript soon. FOr the styling I'm using Tailwindcss. It's currently not open source but it will be as soon as I fix up some of the mess. It went though quite a lot of changes and that's very visible in the code ;)
nbzso 5y ago
Nice. I use vimium-firefox as a default and it is not working. Focusing on one comment at the time is changing the adequate contextual dynamic of relational scanning. All of this only highlights the problem with HN interface. It is time for slight update addressing some basics. - font size - monochromatic theme - dark mode * aside from this "Do not touch anything":) P.S. As a default workaround for HN design issues I use lynx with vim bindings. This gives me font clarity and minimalistic interface.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  With vimium, you probably need to use 'insert mode' with this site.
  - nbzso 5y ago
    Thanks. It is working.
didip 5y ago
Nice. What's the tech stack?
- pabue 5y ago
  Currently it's Vue 2, JS and Tailwindcss. However I will upgrade it to Vue 3 and Typescript soon.
Invictus0 5y ago
I love this but alt + H doesn't work on Firefox
- pabue 5y ago
  Noted, thank you!
kvathupo 5y ago
This is everything I wish the web would move towards: quick, minimalistic design that doesn't hinder the user. I think Reddit is the worst offender in this regard with its slow, bloated redesign that stops my viewing experience. There is also something to be said of the inherent, tactile satisfaction derived from a button-press, as opposed to a mouse-click.
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
Nice as a proof of concept, but it renders one's browser history useless, and Ctrl+F is mostly broken as well. Recommend taking an additive approach—to enhance navigability with new methods, not throw out the stuff that already works (and works well) as a consequence of reasoning that this is A New Thing and New Things are supposed to replace what already exists. Casualties here include stuff like clickable hot zones for navigation if in the given moment one's hands can provide higher bandwidth that way for a desired action, operating on e.g. a link by context menu e.g. to copy it, mouse scrollability, etc. Unlike the poorly reasoned bickering below, it does not follow that these interaction concepts are at odds with one another. Keyboard and mouse accessibility are not mutually exclusive.
asow92 5y ago
Like the keyboard shortcuts, and miss the old design. Would love these shortcuts with the old design; if it ain't broke, go fly a kite and be with your kids instead.
- hidden-spyder 5y ago
  The Refined HackerNews browser extension gets you pretty close to those keyboard shortcuts without changing the design.
NomadicDaggy 5y ago
Now do Reddit! Please!
junon 5y ago
Nit: Alt+H should also close the overlay as well.
- pabue 5y ago
  Makes sense, gonna add that. Thanks.
rafaelturk 5y ago
I love this! Amazing..
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you so much!
specialist 5y ago
Hot damn. Haxplore is cool. This is kinda how I imagine all my clients should work. HN, feedly & NetNewsWire, Overcast & Podcast.app, Music.app. It's like a synthesis of file explorers and media consumption. Bravo. (I've got a bunch of other UX notions for power users.)
- pabue 5y ago
  Damn, thank you! Let's see if some of them get inspired. ;)
- fouric 5y ago
  I would extend "file browser" to be the more general "tree navigation" - for instance, Miller Columns[1] (which I believe is an accurate characterization of Haxplore's interface) are used in the Pharo environment[2] to navigate objects. In general, though, I agree with you - I think that most of the media tools that we use today could benefit from Miller Columns and a keyboard-driven design.... I'm interested in talking about UI affordances for power users - would you be interested? If so, drop me an email (you don't have your email in your HN profile, and in-thread discussion isn't a good use of HN space). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns [2] https://pharo.org/features.html https://pharo.org/features.html
  - specialist 5y ago
    Hi. Thank you for leaning in, sharing your ideas. I'll check out Pharo. Peeking at it, it reminds me of a Smalltalk dev env. Cool. 1. Navigation For navigation, my blue sky notion is to have ad hoc hierarchies. So imagine allowing the user to reorder those Miller columns. And any metadata item can be used as a column. And then the hierarchy browser (Finder equiv) infers the new tree. This is probably called faceted navigation. So in the case of Haxplore, the columns for one nav view I want are 'Author', 'Date', 'Kind' (eg OC, Show, Ask). For music, I want a nav view to sort by Producer. For movies, views for Director and Writer. For podcasts, views for Guests and Topic. Any way, you get the idea. 2. Filtering All nav views should have filters. (I forget which IDE allowed this.) Not just Spotlight style results, or Amazon style faceted product searches. Because I still want to drill down thru the resultset using Miller columns. 3. Quantified Self Log all the activity and metrics client side. For podcasts and audio books, log when and where I was. For all content, record if I looked at it, how long I looked at it, if I just deleted or skipped, etc. My count of podcast subscriptions is ridiculous. But I'm afraid (FOMO) of deleting something I liked. My own metrics would help me manage my consumption. Creating ad hoc 'follow' subscriptions would be cool too. Remember HN commenters I liked. The podcast guests I liked. Ditto producers and directors. Etc.
rcarmo 5y ago
Nice, but I would like to have a mix between this, https://hackerweb.app https://hackerweb.app, and gmail. For instance, I keep hitting "?" for help and would love to have consistent navigation down to the content level.
umvi 5y ago
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 top 30 links (or more) would be nice.
- pabue 5y ago
  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?
  - umvi 5y ago
    On vanilla HN, a story is roughly 30 pixels in height with 5 pixels of whitespace between stories: PostgreSQL 14 (postgresql.org) [20px tall] 399 points by jkatz05 2 hours ago [10px tall] [5px spacer] On Haxplore, a story is roughly 75 pixels tall with 32 pixels of spacing. If you decide to implement a high density mode (I would make sure other users beside me want this before doing that work), the primary concern IMO is just cramming more stories onto the page so users can scan down the page to read more story headlines without scrolling. That could be achieved many ways, but if it were me I would probably do a combo of reducing whitespace, reducing font size, and removing/consolidating story info (i.e. instead of URL having it's own line, move a truncated version of URL next to story title like vanilla HN does)
    - laumars 5y ago
      > If you decide to implement a high density mode (I would make sure other users beside me want this before doing that work), That’s a refreshingly humble request. So often in FOSS I see people demanding features, even being downright critical at times. It’s really nice seeing someone suggest their feature request might not be popular is rare. Thank you for restoring my faith in humanity :)
KronisLV 5y ago
This feels like a nice way to navigate websites, but at the same time looks way better than most of the keyboard driven interfaces (since the apps that are optimized for that are typically TUI)! In my eyes, that just proves the feasibility of the input method, as opposed to having to click around - it can work for a variety of types of content!
itsbits 5y ago
This is really really cool. I am gonna use it more. Couple of suggestions thgh. 1) Blurring can be avoided. 3) jump to parent story of any level comment via keyboard 2) Is there possibility of logging in? so that we can do comment/upvote/downvote as well via keyboard.
picardo 5y ago
Nice work. Minor issue, but when I open the Menu with M, the focus should be in the dropdown menu, so I can navigate it with the arrow up and down. Otherwise, works great!
- pabue 5y ago
  Thanks! You're right, that part is a bit weird. I added that in the last moment and didn't really spend much time on making in good.
  - picardo 5y ago
    A couple of more ideas: * Some way to go to the top of the page without refreshing the page. * Some way to load new posts asynchronously without refreshing the page.
    - pabue 5y ago
      1. The last update added support for the page up, page down and home keys. That should make it easier to get back to the top. 2. Do you mean loading more posts when you reached the end of the list? This will also be added in one of the next few updates. Thank you!
      - picardo 5y ago
        > The last update added support for the page up, page down and home keys. That should make it easier to get back to the top. I use a Mac Air. I don't have these keys. > Do you mean loading more posts when you reached the end of the list? This will also be added in one of the next few updates. No, I mean the usecase when let's say I'm viewing a post or even when I'm on the home page, and I want to check if there have been new comments or new posts without reloading the page.
whage 5y ago
Fantastic job. I love that I can easily read breadth-first.
turtlebits 5y ago
Very cool! I think you should leave scrolling alone, the selection animation is too fast to read all the stories and comments as a list. Acting like a mobile OS picker is annoying. Also nitpick, Alt-H is not an easy key to hit on mac, why not just '?'
mlukaszek 5y ago
Like it! Some suggestions to consider: - I'm missing a "jump back up" shortcut, something I'd recommend using capital "G" for, like in Vim. - It seems it hits some hardcoded limit for paging? i.e. it does not allow me to open more stories once I reach the "bottom" one. - Two things I'm used to that exist in the Android app I'm using: * stories are numbered, so I see how far from the top I am. It's a dimmed down grey number, but it's there and I like it. * depending on the number of comments, an article can be marked as hot with a "fire" emoji. I got used to that to immediately spot things which are trending. Overall, well done! I am definitely subscribing, and I'll test if I can switch to it on Android. (edit: typos)
- C19is20 5y ago
  Agreed on android: materialistic?
  - mlukaszek 5y ago
    Yes, materialistic is what I settled down on so far!
    - jimmySixDOF 5y ago
      You guys should check out HACK for HN , released in August - vs Materialistic which hasn't been touched in a long while.
JohnL4 5y ago
Content-free comment, but WOW this is really slick!
eigenrick 5y ago
Great design! Unfortunately it doesn't work on my setup. On Firefox on Linux with SwayWM None of the hotkeys work except the arrows and hjkl. Alt-h opens up mozilla's help menu. Enter opens up the site's help menu. (maybe because that was the last thing I clicked on?) And 'o' does nothing that I can tell.
yyyk 5y ago
I get "Error: No available storage method found." in console on Firefox-esr in incognito mode.
hidden-spyder 5y ago
Off topic, but where did you get the idea for the design? I love it! Not something I get to see regularly.
- pabue 5y ago
  Tbh I'm not sure. I think the idea for the control scheme came e from video game consoles like the Nintendo switch or PS. And the visual design is a result of a few iterations of trying to make it appealing while still keeping some of the spirit of HN.
porterbeats 5y ago
This is fantastic! Thank you for making this.
OrvalWintermute 5y ago
Really love the interface and how high performance it is. Very well thought out! I've been browsing through HN using Haxplore and I can really navigate fast! This is kinda like vi
SubiculumCode 5y ago
Why a client when the native HN interface is close to perfection?
dbbljack 5y ago
this seems really great for people who want vim in the... actually wait we all have browser extensions already.
message 5y ago
Love it! Great work <3
jobsort 5y ago
Is there a specific library or package folks use to enable hotkeys on a page, or is it commonly done via vanilla JS?
- pabue 5y ago
  I'm using hotkeys-js for most projects where hotkeys are a thing. You can do with vanilla js but it's a bit of work to do it right.
prohobo 5y ago
This is design. It's great, works well and does exactly what you'd want it to. The one issue I see (as others have mentioned) is that it's difficult to orient yourself because the app only allows focusing on one thing at a time.
flanbiscuit 5y ago
I love the keyboard navigation. Speaking of, on FF when I go to the Hacker News home page and I tab navigate, the only thing it can tab to is the search input at the bottom. Does anyone else have issues or is it just me?
shpongled 5y ago
I love it. I would kill for one for reddit too.
- asdff 5y ago
  rtv is an old standard tool that behaves similarly imo. I don't think its under active development anymore but it still works (i'm sure theres a fork or a similar reddit cli under active development these days)
- Fraaaank 5y ago
  Have you ever tried https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ ?
asdff 5y ago
I can't open comments on firefox. hitting O does nothing. Opening new links also opens them in a popup window rather than a new tab, so firefox blocks those by default too. Overall its nice to use a keyboard but the information density is so poor and the site isn't as performant as news.ycombinator.com so I won't be making a switch, and I can't comment on how it renders comments since it doesn't open comment sections in firefox at least. I've been on the hunt for a HN TUI client or some other way to make threads play nicely with a text based browser. That would really help with my newsboat based internet consumption if I didn't have to open a browser to read comment threads. I have gotten close, but with all the text based browsers I've tried, they all don't indent comments correctly in threads which makes it not very useful.
- spiralx 5y ago
  > I can't open comments on firefox. hitting O does nothing. Opening new links also opens them in a popup window rather than a new tab, so firefox blocks those by default too. Took me a while to realise you opened things by pressing the right arrow/D/K, and instead O and Alt+O open the current comment or article in HN. I'm not sure why they have different keypresses, makes it even more confusing.
cacois 5y ago
Phenomenal idea! Really great approach to forum UX. I sincerely hope you keep working on this, I'd love to see how it evolves.
- pabue 5y ago
  Wow, thanks! Don't worry, I will definitely keep working on it. With all that great feedback I don't think I have any other choice. ;)
gnull 5y ago
Being unable to see the whole (sub-)tree while reading the comments is a major disadvantage for me so far. If you read a thread that goes like a dialog with each new reply being nested under the previous one, this web app requires a key press to see each new reply — you never see them simultaneously. But this app is an interesting take. I'm also not happy with unnecessarily mouse-driven interfaces
qorrect 5y ago
I love it. Now put it in Emacs and we have a forever client.
muhammadusman 5y ago
I'm loving it, it's so fast!
danschumann 5y ago
Why doesn't the konami code work?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bilekas 5y ago
I absolutely love this. Super smooth, can it be applied to other feeds also ?
albert_e 5y ago
Kudos! This feels like something I have been sorely missing without knowing the words to express it. THANK YOU!
alexvoda 5y ago
Is it possible to add quick way to add a bookmark for a story or comment and a read leater stack?
picardo 5y ago
Some of the comments in here don't show up on Haxplore until much later. It looks like the API response is being cached... which gives me a pause because navigating the comments is the best part of Haxplore interface.
Invictus0 5y ago
I'd love if: * the site marked when I had already clicked a link * the site respected URLs so I can easily share links * I can read older HN links in your interface
- pabue 5y ago
  1. Great idea, this will be added in one of the next updates 2. This is planned also will also be added soon 3. How would you expect this to work? Would you want a search? Or an input for pasting HN links? Thank you!
ww520 5y ago
This looks excellent especially for keyboard navigation. May I give a suggestion? Add support for PgUp & PgDown to skip couple items, both in the post list view and the comment list view.
fouric 5y ago
This is a really interesting project. It's also incomplete - but, in fairness, building a HN client that most people would consider "complete" is a massive undertaking (HN login, themes, customizable keyboard shortcuts, mouse support, pre-fetching, "read" status markers). Instead, here's some feedback about the interesting/different parts of the design: 1. Having WASD, HJKL, and arrow-key navigation is nice - most tools commit to exactly one of those three. 2. I believe that not blurring the leftward (parent) column would be better than giving a toggle-able parent comment in the current column. 3. The keyboard shortcut + "Help" button in the corner is great - I regularly forget what bindings are available for a new tool that I'm in the first few minutes of using, and then often get bored and leave. 4. Placing the comment content all the way at the top of the box slightly encourages focus on that content, which is good - HN puts the username and posting age at the top instead, which is a distraction, and makes it slightly easier to think about users instead of content. 5. Lack of pagination is great - no more artificial second-page barrier. 6. You could use more of the screen space - for me, about a third is just empty, even when I zoom. Less interesting stuff: there's some visual rendering bugs of italics and the "M" menu isn't keyboard-navigable (this isn't meant to be a feature request; I know you're focused on making the site keyboard-driven). Congrats on making a relatively resource-efficient and visual-space-efficient web app!
stephencoyner 5y ago
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.
jamesbfb 5y ago
I see many different iterations of HN "clients/fontends/apps" posted here, this is by far my fav, and the first one I have bookmarked! The hjkl keybindings made my day :)
touristtam 5y ago
nice but I still like to use my mouse to navigate through a website.
firexcy 5y ago
Thank you for sharing this. HN’s default layout and behavior have never made sense to me and I always rely on alternative front-ends if I’m spending more than a glance on a thread. Currently I’m settled on hn.premii.com but your attempt seems promising. One suggestion: I know the client is designed to be a single-page app, but is it possible to have a constructed permalink for each submission and comment thereto? On hn.premii.com that I mentioned above, I can have links in the form of hn.premii.com/#/comments/28704873 so that I can create a bookmarklet to jump directly from a original HN page to a “optimized” version. I hope it will also be possible with yours.
devenvdev 5y ago
Well done! The only issue I have is that I receive top HN via Pushbullet, a link straight to HN, I wonder how can I quickly open a specific entry in Haxplore?
aaronpkelly 5y ago
Well done! This is the project I've been trying to build in my spare time, and you have beat me to it! I would also favour seeing a hn-theme that preserved the colours and fonts :)
Siira 5y ago
How do you scroll long comments without the mouse?
avaku 5y ago
I am still using this now, after 3 days, to read hacker news. I hope this project stays alive.
spurgu 5y ago
Hey, don't know if you're still reading, but the ability to sort frontpage by Best would be an awesome addition! Been using this for the last couple of days. There's a slight tradeoff due to not having a good overview of the "discussion tree", but overall it's a super smooth way of browsing HN!

594 points by pabue 5y ago

jack335 5y ago

That is really cool!

pabue 5y ago
Thank you so much!

pabue 5y ago

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 open them directly - Better readbility and formatting of comments - Hotkeys for the most common actions - Ability to open stories or comments in an overlay for reading long texts

davidcollantes 5y ago
How do I read the comments?
- pabue 5y ago
  You have to use your arrow keys, WASD or HJKL to navigate through the comments.
  - Noumenon72 5y ago
    I could not figure this out even after using the help dialog repeatedly, since I assumed "navigate" meant "scrolling up and down the page", and there were three shortcuts that actually mentioned comments.
    - qorrect 5y ago
      It's built for people who use the keyboard, your mouse will not help you here.
egeozcan 5y ago
Please work on this more, this is just such a pleasant interface! On the other hand, the criticism here in HN is also mostly correct. It should be more accessible, but definitely a great start!
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you very much! Got great feedback so far, so I'm definitely gonna work on it and try to improve the experience.
  - qorrect 5y ago
    I love the keyboard interface please don't listen to anyone trying to change that part :).
    - pabue 5y ago
      Don't worry, I will definitely not change anything about the keyboard control part. You have my word! ;)
user207 5y ago
brilliant work, please do twitter next very addicting
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you! That's funny, when I started this project I actually wanted to build it for HN, Reddit and Twitter, but couldn"t find the time for it and scrapped that idea. Guess I should revisit that decision.
- PKop 5y ago
  Twitter already has keyboard navigation
snsr 5y ago
The web page doesn’t scroll.
- pabue 5y ago
  This is intentional. You have to use your arrow keys, WASD or HJKL to navigate.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - john-doe 5y ago
    Mixed with keyboard tabbing, it gets really confusing.
    - pabue 5y ago
      This is true. I recommend to not use keyboard tabbing while navigating throught the comments. Makes it a lot less confusing and you still do everything.
  - andrewl-hn 5y ago
    However, it's impossible to read longer comments this way. This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28705415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28705415 in this very thread is too long to fit in my browser window, which is maximized on my 16" laptop. So far I'm just pressing O, but it still takes time. A scroll for long comments would be really welcomed. Other than that, it's a very cool UI! I can see using it full-time and press O only when I want to reply. Actually, I just did :D
    - pabue 5y ago
      You can actually press spacebar to open a comment inside a modal where you can scroll. Wow, thank you very much! :D
kimusan 5y ago
I like the design - too bad that HN does not allow for you to add comment support. That would make it perfect
- exikyut 5y ago
  I was just thinking about this myself. It would be so awesome to add something like OAuth2! But then I realized, this would break the subtle cohesion of the current model. Everyone has to specifically come back to news.yc to comment. Everyone has to use the HN design. I do wonder if this is intentional, or at least strategic - because the current approach enforces a certain perspective when commenting that *perhaps* might be broken, or at least made much much harder to maintain, by the fragmentation induced from being able to run off and build totally alternative interfaces. It's just a thought. I'm not sure if this is just hot air.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    I've thought the same thing. Looking at reddit, whenever someone complains about degredation of discussion, somebody pops up and says "just use old.reddit.com". However, everyone else is still on new reddit, so even if you increase the quality of your submissions, the overall quality still drops.
    - deaddodo 5y ago
      I would use the new reddit interface specifically if they re-enabled the old comment experience. The current one is terrible.
  - vxNsr 5y ago
    My understanding is it’s an attempt at spam reduction. By not providing an API for commenting they make it harder for spammers.
  - archon810 5y ago
    I'm able to add comments using my current unofficial Android app. These apps just work around the requirement by issuing some sort of HTTP requests similar to the site itself.
exikyut 5y ago
Intitial impression: "oookay [click] let's have a look let's see how badly broken *this* HN frontend i--ooh. Oh, okay. Wow this is nice!" And it truly is. There's something this honestly nails. But after using it for few moments, I was able to crystallize what I perceived was "wrong" with the design: the mechanic of combining locality with spatiality means I completely lose sight of the bigger picture. I have a really bad memory and attention span, so I depend on constantly reading cues/senses of scale from my environment. As in, they need to be constantly there. (For example, the first thing I'd do if I ever used a Mac was make the scrollbars permanently visible.) With this UI, the immediate and global focus (the only focus) is on the comment I'm reading right now. Paradoxically, the clear intuition is that this would reduce distraction and increase focus, but (at least for me) by only presenting individual details I cannot establish and maintain orientation about how big a thread is, the structure of it (a few large mega-subthreads, or subthread islands, or hundreds of upvotes but only like 15 total comments), etc. I tend to take full advantage of scroooooling through and cherry-picking comments to read at random. I've long dreamed of solutions that provide a rigid framework that ensure I read every comment, but I've kind of accepted that such approaches just don't work in practice; they require a tremendous amount of discipline to use (almost like grammar-proofreading a book). A UI that has me consider every single comment as globally important ("it's the only thing on the screen at this exact moment"), both a) maxes out my attention span very quickly and b) feeds me a non-representative, breadth-first view of the discussion, because I find there's a nontrivial effort associated with needing to hit the right arrow key to expand the comments: I Have No Idea How Many Subcomments Are Hiding In There nO I aM NoT GoInG iN ThErE ThAt iS ScArY. For whatever reason (???) it's physiologically easier to just keep hitting Down instead. This is honestly novel and interesting - and because of how well-executed this is, I can say that if you were to ever to consider tackling global orientation (I'm imagining spotlight/expose type zooming here, but I strongly suspect that would be just as disorientating as not being able to vaguely internalize the bigger picture at all), I would be very interested to see.
- ydant 5y ago
  Agreed with pretty much everything here. It's a nice UI, looks good, is smooth, well done overall. However, it doesn't fit how I read HN or Reddit - I tend to scan and be drawn to keywords and visually interesting parts of the thread. This type of UI turns the comments into a TODO list of indeterminate length.
bennyp101 5y ago
I like this! I use a tiling WM, so I can have this open in a window (or scratchpad) that is shrunk to the width of your column, and just shoot over to it, and move around nice and easily! Two things: - alt + h doesn't open the Help for me, it opens the actual help menu in Firefox. - It would be nice to mark the entries as 'read' and show if more comments have happened since reading Edit: Wrapping it in a small Tauri app would be cool, then it gets rid of the bookmarks and stuff I have at the top :D
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you for liking it :D 1. The alt+h hotkey will be probably be replaced by "?". That should fix this. 2.1 That's a pretty cool idea. Would you want the "mark as read" part to happen automatically or manually? 2.2 Showing new/unread comments is also a cool idea but it will increase the amount of requests to the HN api. However I'm gonna look into it. Wrapping it in a Tauri might be cool, because I actually wanted to try that. But I think the first step would be to make it a PWA, so you can install it without downloading anything. Thank you for the feeback!
  - kbenson 5y ago
    > Showing new/unread comments is also a cool idea but it will increase the amount of requests to the HN api. However I'm gonna look into it. At the simplest level LocalStorage or equivalent keyed on the submission id with a prior comment count to be compared with the new comment count would be sufficient. If it had a time of hast check as well, highlighting new comments would also be easy. I'm not sure about other people, but thise are really the two things I care about most when trying to keep up with a discussion (are there new comments, and which are they).
    - mkl 5y ago
      Storing view time would make things easy, but might break on subthreads. You can probably just store all the comment ids in LocalStorage, and highlight comments that aren't in that set before putting them in there (or maybe put them in there only when scrolled to/past).
ostenning 5y ago
Really nice, bravo
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you!
dionian 5y ago
Cool UI. nice job
hoofedear 5y ago
Can’t wait to try this when I get home!
zabil 5y ago
Great work, especially the comment navigation. I find it much easier to view the comment threads and scan top level comments.
avaku 5y ago
Reading this post on Haxplore itself is even better :)
mrmattyboy 5y ago
This is awesome!! :) One tiny thing (though everyone's tiny suggestions sure add up :D ) (aside from the alt-h not working in firefox)... It would be awesome if hitting space or something on a selected post would open it in a iframe (or panel) in the middle of the screen. Then be able to up-arrow/down-array (or PGUP/PGDOWN) through the page and escape out of it. This would mean you can quickly skim an article without leaving the app! But, well done, it's absolutely wicked :D
- seFausto 5y ago
  I completely agree on the iframe. After opening a link I keep trying to go back by pressing the left arrow. Pressing Ctrl+W is not to bad to close the tab though.
  - mrmattyboy 5y ago
    Indeed, not too bad and this is what I did, but certainly not immediately natural, as you have to rely on the browser's tab history (i.e. you closed this tab, redirect user to previous tab), so wouldn't work if I starting viewing a HN post, then continued work (that I should have been originally doing) then go back to the post, close it and then browser redirects me back to the 'work' tab that I came back from..... if you see what I mean. Tab history: * Expected: HN client -> website from post -(ctrl+w)-> HN client vs: * HN Client -> HN post website -(switch tab)-> real work work tab -(switch back)-> HN post website -(ctrl+w)-> real work tab :( )* *Think I opened a bracket somewhere in the comment and haven't closed it
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you! I'm definitely not complaining about the amount of feedback. It's really amazing. That really is a great idea. One issue might be that not every site allows being shown in an iframe because they block that functionality. But I'm gonna look into it!
  - mrmattyboy 5y ago
    yeh, I can imagine that feature spiralling in complexity (up to pre-checking server-side if they provide CSP/Frame headers, then outright download and proxy the page :P ) Yeh, I could maybe image a 'p' button that would show a preview, that would just be hit-and-miss... I wonder what percentage of submissions on hacker news actively disallow iframes... like actual blog posts and not things like 'new apple product' from Apple's website :wondering:
Mooty 5y ago
Would love to see a PWA from this, as most I've found are basically ugly. Congrats for the work done. PS : Please use another color scheme or put a dark mode somehow, my wife will kill me if I open the app at night.
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you. I will add some basic PWA functionality soon. Oh, and I just addeda dark theme. Just to keep you alive. ;) It should be applied automatically, but you can also change it in the settings.
gwbas1c 5y ago
Really cool! My $0.02: I wish this looked more like hacker news: IE, same colors, same fonts, same text size. I've been using Hacker News for so long that its look and feel are part of its queues. Different colors / fonts just gives the same content a different feel. I'm torn on how you display comments. One thing that I don't like in Hacker News is that a top-level comment with a lot of replies ends up pushing other top-level comments too far in the page. Your approach, though, is the polar opposite: Never show replies until I select a comment and push ->. Perhaps show a few of the replies with smaller text?
- filoleg 5y ago
  wow, I've never even thought of such a simple change until I've read your reply (all comments collapsed by default as opposed to expanded by default), but I want it really badly now. Many HN apps and browser extension by now have an easy way to to collapse comments (usually by clicking an icon next to the comment or tapping on the comment on touchscreens), but I don't think I've seen one yet where collapsed by default is an option. P.S. And now that I am thinking more about it, apps and extensions (at least the ones i've used so far) don't even have the true "collapsing" function (or maybe I just wasn't aware of where it is buried in the settings, so please let me know if I am wrong here). When you try to collapse on Refined HN (ff/chrome extension) or HACK (iOS app), it doesn't hide all child comments and then keeps the root comment (just listed those two extensions/apps as an example, because those are the two I personally use). It hides the content of all comments including the root comment that you clicked, but it leaves a small indicator that there is a collapsed comment, basically just the username and the number of comments. To this point, I have a question to everyone. If there is an HN app for iOS that anyone can genuinely recommend that has a feature when you collapse a comment, it still shows the one you clicked "collapse" on but hides all child comments (as opposed to the text content of the root comment you collapsed being hidden as well), please post them.
  - behnamoh 5y ago
    Reading the comments on Haxplore using Haxplore is so meta: https://imgur.com/a/v4tbfqP https://imgur.com/a/v4tbfqP
albert_e 5y ago
idea: can you pre-fetch just the top comment for each post? Currently ..clicking on right arrow always shows the "loading" animation for 0.5-1 sec. Instead, if we readily show the top comment instantly and then lazy-load the rest, it will drastically improve the UX. User will perceive near zero wait time that way. My 2 cents
- pabue 5y ago
  Thanks, that's a pretty good idea. I will probably add this in the future, but so far everyone seems to be okay with the performance/speed.
behnamoh 5y ago
It's very sleek, responsive, and friendly! Kudos! Please don't let it die like many other Show HNs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682173
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you! I will definitely keep working on it. If you are interested you can always take a look at the changelog: https://haxplore.sleekplan.app/changelog https://haxplore.sleekplan.app/changelog
benhurmarcel 5y ago
This is amazing, thanks! Personally I am a fan of scanning over threads on https://hckrnews.com/ 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.
joeframbach 5y ago
> 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...
- pabue 5y ago
  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.
IncRnd 5y ago
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!
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you! That's totally fine.
dstroot 5y ago
Vue + Tailwindcss?
- pabue 5y ago
  Correct.
charbuff 5y ago
I miss a tiny thing: seeing when each comment was created.
- pabue 5y ago
  Good catch, this will be added in the next update.
seFausto 5y ago
I really like it! I'll use it as my default HN client for a while, see how it goes. This app makes me focus more on the content than regular scrolling HN.
- pabue 5y ago
  I'm really glad to hear that. Heads up, there will a big update in the next few days.
birksherty 5y ago
I really prefer that it shows only the top level comments by default, which can be expanded with a simple key. Overall fantastic experience. I just have two suggestions. Add a dark theme and options to show only top 10/top 20/all just like hckrnews.com which helps to keep track of things and not miss important stories on busy days.
thameera 5y ago
Love this, and hope you continue the development. Feature request: Ability to open an HN URL in Haxplore.

drKarl 5y ago

Cool idea, but not very Mobile friendly

pabue 5y ago
Thank you. And yeah it does not really work on mobile, but to be fair it's not supposed to. I only spend a few minutes on it to make it somewhat useable. As far as I know here are many other HN clones that improve the mobile experience, so I focused solely on building something cool for desktop/keyboard users.
- stavros 5y ago
  Deciding that it's not meant for mobile is a perfectly acceptable position to take, in my opinion.
  - egeozcan 5y ago
    Yes! To the UI developers: Please don't let optimizing for a single platform become a lost art. Not saying cross-platform should not be done or anything like that, but using an application that's 100% tailored to my device is nice to experience, from time to time.

gus_massa 5y ago

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 "<- Back" 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".

pabue 5y ago
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.
- gus_massa 5y ago
  As I said, I like to use the mouse. Just make everything clickable :) .

soheil 5y ago

Why are you blurring the previous row? Why are you disabling scrolling? These are hostile to the user.

capableweb 5y ago
Scrolling is disabled because this is not a website for mouse control, it's explicitly made for keyboards. You can notice this by the application not having any mouse controls at all, no links and so on. It's not user hostile if the goal is keyboard controls.
- soheil 5y ago
  There is no reason to disable scrolling even if the primary interactions are supposed to happen with keyboard. I don’t want to remember which websites allow scrolling and which don’t.
  - vonadz 5y ago
    I'd say there is a point. With disabled scrolling you can guarantee that the "cursor" will always be on the screen. With scrolling enabled, you could out scroll the selection, making for worse UI experience. I'm also not a fan of blurring the previous article, but I guess they chose to do it to put focus on your current selection.
- pritambarhate 5y ago
  It's an informative website. This is bad UX for an informative site. Sure it can support keyboard shortcuts for additional fast access. It will be better for power users. But disabling scrolling with mouse and touchpad is hostile and counter productive to the casual users who might be interested in the content.
  - vonadz 5y ago
    It appears the whole point of this site is the keyboard navigation. If you don't like it, just use Hacker News.

yoavm 5y ago

I loved the keyboard navigation. Alt+H opens Firefox's Help menu for me however. I wanted to try using it for a while, but then I wanted to comment here, and well, it seems like commenting still has to be done from the normal interface... :)

WithinReason 5y ago

I particularly like the response time (low latency). It's underappreciated in web design.

pabue 5y ago
That was definitely an important aspect while building it. I'm also glad the HN api is so damn fast.

agumonkey 5y ago

I love these ergonomics. Thanks for keyboard lovers like me.

jb1991 5y ago

Cool, but I find just scrolling the page with the MBP trackpad to be much easier for getting a feel for the discussion.

kuu 5y ago

First of all, congratulations on shipping it! It's pretty cool. Some feelings I had while using it, just in case it's useful to you: - To me is a bit strange than when I'm focused on comments, by pressing Enter it opens the URL of the article (that it's not my focus right now). - Also I would like to add comments, but I think in this version is still not possible. - As others mention, it wouldn't hurt that those actions can be both done by mouse and keys (or maybe the title of the submission should be "HN with keyboard") I like the colors and the blur effect, nice touch :)

pabue 5y ago
Thank you very much! 1. In get why that might be a bit confusing. The problem is, you can't focus the article/post after opening the comments, so you would have to go back in order to open the link. I didn't find a better solution at the time, so I just left it like this. Maybe I just have to think a bit harder ;) 2. I mostly just read discussions that's why I didn't even consider a comment feature. But I'm definitely gonna look into that and see if it's possible. 3. Might be a good idea. I actually had a mouse/keyboard switch at some point but removed it because it was a bit buggy and confusing. Maybe I should rethink that. Thanks for your feedback!

jccalhoun 5y ago

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

lopis 5y ago
It's a HN client with keyboard navigation. Not sure what you expect.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  How would they have expected anything when that's all the page and the title of the submission say?
- ajdude 5y ago
  As someone who browses the internet by default without any JavaScript enabled, I also find it jarring when websites do this. I understand that some webapps absolutely need JavaScript to function, but I wish it was handled with a bit more tact than a completely blank page displaying a single sentence asking me to enable it. I'm not calling out op, twitter and quora do this too.

pramodbiligiri 5y ago

This is great! For stories with 100s of comments it's nice to start browsing from a collapsed view of top-level comments. - Why is the Comments count shown only for the highlighted story? - On Firefox Windows, pressing the Enter key on an item triggers a popup warning at the top of the page. Took me a few tries to notice what was going on. - Alt + H triggers the Firefox Help menu for me :| Can you change that shortcut key to "?" instead? GMail, Github etc use "?". - The green background for the comment text is a bit too dark. - Is it just me or is the comment text not showing paragraph breaks? - The zoom in transition when the comment text modal shows up just slows things down. If I'm going to load many comments in that view I'd rather it load instantly. Also, what's the purpose of this modal? There's a "Space -> Read" for the comment that I'm already reading. I don't get it.

Aissen 5y ago
Re: Alt+H ; it's the same for Alt+O on Firefox.
- pabue 5y ago
  Thank you! Gonna fix that later.
pabue 5y ago
1. I initially wanted to display as little information as possbile to keep it clean and prevent clutter, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to show at least the comments count. 2. Oh, I didn't notice that. Might be caused by the way the new tab is opened. Gonna look into that, thanks. 3. Good catch, gonna change that. 4. Do mean contrast wise? 5. You're right, the spacing between paragraphs is missing. That will get fixed. 6. Yea, I will probably increase the speed of the transition to match the rest of the UI. The modal exists for reading longer comments. It's unnecessary for most, but during testing I found quite a lot of very long comments (especially in Ask HN) that didn't fit on the screen. Scrolling directly inside the comment felt weird, so I added the modal. It also increases the text size and makes it easier to read long paragraphs. Thank you very much for your feedback!
- 5y ago

jaxx75 5y ago

If anyone likes this interface, I highly recommend Vimium on Chrome and Firefox.

jamespwilliams 5y ago

Looks good and works well. Browsing with Vimium is good enough for me though, and means I can reuse muscle memory to/from other sites.

plibither8 5y ago

This is really nice OP, love it! Reminds me of my own Chrome extension, Refined Hacker News [1], with almost identical keybindings built into the HN interface. Neat coincidence :) [1]: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news#on-items-and-comments https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news#on-items-a...

TimMeade 5y ago

I like it. It's strangely refreshing! I do agree the colors are a little odd. Might be the strangely part! :-)

pabue 5y ago
Thanks! What about the colors do you find odd? I didn't put that much thought into the color choices, so I'm really curious.

sz4kerto 5y ago

It's great. But. Can you please give me an option to just select the entry as if it was a 'normal' menu instead of scrolling the whole page and keeping the 'cursor' steady at the top?

pabue 5y ago
Thanks! This is something I initially tested during development but didn"t feel right for me, so I scrapped. But having an option to switch the mode might be a good idea.

BatteryMountain 5y ago

Well done, works perfectly on Firefox 92 on Fedora 34. The smooth animations & responsiveness to key-presses are spot on! Can we please have Dark Mode?

blokeley 5y ago
Yes, install Dark Reader https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/
- BatteryMountain 5y ago
  Can confirm, plays well with darkreader.

crhutchins 5y ago

This looks great! The animations are smooth, and the details seem to load fast. How about you try a specific subreddit?

pabue 5y ago
Thank you! I was actually thinking about adding support for reddit. Might add that in the future.

qwertox 5y ago

I'm surprised at how smooth this is and am really considering this as a replacement of the HN page for me. The only thing I'd love to have added would be an inline mode, where replies to comments are also shown on the top level of the comment section, but indented, just like it's on YC's HN. More things: - Always show comments count - Reloading a comment section should not bring you back to the front page (clear entire state).

pabue 5y ago
Thank you, that is really nice to hear. I'm not sure about an inline mode because that would kind of defeat the initial purpose of this app. But, I did write it down and will see if there are others who would like this. There is now an option to always show the comments count. I'm currently working on exactly that issue. One of the next updates will add support for changes to the browser history and URL so you will be able to reload or share the URL at any point. You can check the changelog if you are interested: https://haxplore.sleekplan.app/changelog https://haxplore.sleekplan.app/changelog

FailMore 5y ago

Front end bug on mobile. As you down arrow the faded part at the top gets smaller and smaller. Chrome on Pixel

pabue 5y ago
Oh, good catch. Mobile is not really a priority right now, but I'm gonna take a look at it later.

jack_riminton 5y ago

Really nice, fancy doing a dark mode version? Also I didn't quite get how I was supposed to see comments

pabue 5y ago
Thanks, definitely gonna add dark mode soon! I was hoping the arrow would convey enough meaning but I guess it's too subtle. I'm curious, did you read the "How to..." at the start?
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  Well, I 'thought' I'd read the the "How to"! Maybe it needs a small guided tour thing
  - pabue 5y ago
    A guided tour is a good idea. I thought about that too but figured it would be too much for an experiment like that. Maybe I was wrong.

a_c 5y ago

Love having more sites enabled with deterministic navigation! Unrelated, I love keeping my hands on home row, regardless the website I'm visiting with the help of browser plugin vimium. It allows you to navigate with hjkl, label links and opening them with t, quickly jumps to opened tab with o, etc

k__ 5y ago

press delete to hide, and I'm sold.

pabue 5y ago
That's a pretty cool idea. I'm gonna see what I can do. Thank you!

KrishnaAnaril 5y ago

Loved it. But I'm facing a couple of issues. 1. It's difficult to change menu without mouse. 2.Space for read not working in ask hn page.

tartuffe78 5y ago

It would be nice if there were a way for it to "remember" where I left off, or filter stories I've already scrolled past out of the list when I come back.

pabue 5y ago
That's a pretty cool idea. I'm gonna look into that. Thanks!
- cheschire 5y ago
  Might be tough to implement with the display order changing. You’d need to find some way to hide or subdue via ID. But even then you still can’t leap down without looking for unread IDs. Seems like a tough one.

mtmail 5y ago

Can you add the URL to https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news ?

dkatz23238 5y ago

Wow this is really cool and well designed. Sorry for this simple question but what did you use to get the nice sliding like animation? Is that intentional or just a result of updating the currently selected article?

pabue 5y ago
Thank you very much! Good question. The content part is actually moved left and right using CSS transforms. The sliding animation is just a result of adding a transition for this property. Hope this helps. Otherwise just ask ;)

bovermyer 5y ago

I adore this except for one thing - the infinite scroll. If you added paging, it'd be perfect.

pabue 5y ago
Thank you. Paging is something I actually wanted to add at the beginning but then I tought it wouldn't be necessary for an experiment like that. I'm also not quite sure how it would look or work ui wise.

ktzar 5y ago

I'd just ask for a dark theme based on the browser's preferences.

pabue 5y ago
Definitely gonna add an optional dark mode soon!
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Wow, I just came from your interface to this comment. So I guess I'll reply here. What a trip. +1 for dark mode. But also, would you add a shortcut for the left hand for opening comments? I lost my right arm in a tractor accident, and pressing O is a bit annoying. Just kidding, but I do like the idea of R to reply.

thih9 5y ago

I’m impressed that it works on mobile too. I guess best ux is with a keyboard but still it’s nice to see what it’s about.

pabue 5y ago
In the beginning it was so bad on mobile that it was actually completely unusable. I think it's still not very good but at least it's somewhat usable. A keyboard is definitely the recommended input device. ;)
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I immediately got that keyboard is the intended usage, but also was impressed it works on mobile at all. You obviously took care to consider it, and I wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t. Good job!

smallerfish 5y ago

Can you please avoid blurring the prior column (or at least the comment you came from)? It's useful to see context that way. Otherwise I think it's really good. Reddit should have aspired to something this well thought out. (I'd also like page up / page down.)

salamander014 5y ago
I agree. I like the idea of visualizing previous item in some way, maybe faded instead? Should give the same effect.
- pabue 5y ago
  The previous item (or parent comment) is always visible in the white box on top/above the current comment. But it's quite easy overlooked because the change from the article/link to the comment is not very noticable.
goodpoint 5y ago
Good point. On a large screen most of the space is wasted: a blurred column on the left and empty space on the right. This accounts for 2/3 of the of the space. Please use all of it :)
- pabue 5y ago
  At some point during development you could actually see all the columns clearly and most of the screen space was used but it was very disorienting, at least for me. That's why I removed it. But I guess some people think differently, so maybe I'm gonna add an option for that.
  - gota 5y ago
    Seconding the ask to reduce the space dedicated to the previous focus level (left of screen)
pabue 5y ago

cyberjunkie 5y ago

I love this. Every feed and comment based service should use this.

pabue 5y ago
Wow, thank you!

daveungerer 5y ago

It simply shows a loading animation for me. It raises "Error: No available storage method found" on line 2718 of localforage.js. This is Firefox 92 on Ubuntu 24.04.3. It works in Chrome, but I don't use it as my main browser. Spent a minute on it just to see the vim-style navigation, pretty cool. Hope the bug report helps!

pabue 5y ago
Oh, that should not happen. Thanks for the report, I'm gonna look into it.

croddin 5y ago

Great site! On iPhone, if you are tapping a button on the bottom rapidly, (like if you just double tap the down button) it triggers the page to zoom in. It looks like there is an easy css fix for that. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46167604/ios-html-disable-double-tap-to-zoom https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46167604/ios-html-disabl...

pabue 5y ago
Thank you! For the compliment, the bug report and the fix. :D

throwoutway 5y ago

Bookmarked. I hope you continue working on it! The biggest hurdle for me would be to remember to go here instead of news.ycombinator.com though

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
In your HN profile settings, change the top bar color (to something jarring/habit-breaking), as a reminder the next time you land here instead of there.
pabue 5y ago
I will definitely continue working on this. It's great to hear that people actually enjoy using it. I actually moved it to a separate domain, because I don"t think people will remember haxplore.pabue.co when they think about HN. You can now find it here: https://haxplore.com https://haxplore.com

cvs268 5y ago

Nice App. I was trying to create some web-UI like this to read my own dump of bookmarks/notes on various devices. What language/frameworks did you use for the web UI? Is the source available somewhere gitlab/github?

pabue 5y ago
Thank you. I'm using Vue 2 and Javascript, because I actually started this project a while ago. I will probably upgrade it to Vue 3 and Typescript soon. FOr the styling I'm using Tailwindcss. It's currently not open source but it will be as soon as I fix up some of the mess. It went though quite a lot of changes and that's very visible in the code ;)

nbzso 5y ago

Nice. I use vimium-firefox as a default and it is not working. Focusing on one comment at the time is changing the adequate contextual dynamic of relational scanning. All of this only highlights the problem with HN interface. It is time for slight update addressing some basics. - font size - monochromatic theme - dark mode * aside from this "Do not touch anything":) P.S. As a default workaround for HN design issues I use lynx with vim bindings. This gives me font clarity and minimalistic interface.

NoGravitas 5y ago
With vimium, you probably need to use 'insert mode' with this site.
- nbzso 5y ago
  Thanks. It is working.

didip 5y ago

Nice. What's the tech stack?

pabue 5y ago
Currently it's Vue 2, JS and Tailwindcss. However I will upgrade it to Vue 3 and Typescript soon.

Invictus0 5y ago

I love this but alt + H doesn't work on Firefox

pabue 5y ago
Noted, thank you!

kvathupo 5y ago

This is everything I wish the web would move towards: quick, minimalistic design that doesn't hinder the user. I think Reddit is the worst offender in this regard with its slow, bloated redesign that stops my viewing experience. There is also something to be said of the inherent, tactile satisfaction derived from a button-press, as opposed to a mouse-click.

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago

Nice as a proof of concept, but it renders one's browser history useless, and Ctrl+F is mostly broken as well. Recommend taking an additive approach—to enhance navigability with new methods, not throw out the stuff that already works (and works well) as a consequence of reasoning that this is A New Thing and New Things are supposed to replace what already exists. Casualties here include stuff like clickable hot zones for navigation if in the given moment one's hands can provide higher bandwidth that way for a desired action, operating on e.g. a link by context menu e.g. to copy it, mouse scrollability, etc. Unlike the poorly reasoned bickering below, it does not follow that these interaction concepts are at odds with one another. Keyboard and mouse accessibility are not mutually exclusive.

asow92 5y ago

Like the keyboard shortcuts, and miss the old design. Would love these shortcuts with the old design; if it ain't broke, go fly a kite and be with your kids instead.

hidden-spyder 5y ago
The Refined HackerNews browser extension gets you pretty close to those keyboard shortcuts without changing the design.

NomadicDaggy 5y ago

Now do Reddit! Please!

junon 5y ago

Nit: Alt+H should also close the overlay as well.

pabue 5y ago
Makes sense, gonna add that. Thanks.

rafaelturk 5y ago

I love this! Amazing..

pabue 5y ago
Thank you so much!

specialist 5y ago

Hot damn. Haxplore is cool. This is kinda how I imagine all my clients should work. HN, feedly & NetNewsWire, Overcast & Podcast.app, Music.app. It's like a synthesis of file explorers and media consumption. Bravo. (I've got a bunch of other UX notions for power users.)

pabue 5y ago
Damn, thank you! Let's see if some of them get inspired. ;)
fouric 5y ago
I would extend "file browser" to be the more general "tree navigation" - for instance, Miller Columns[1] (which I believe is an accurate characterization of Haxplore's interface) are used in the Pharo environment[2] to navigate objects. In general, though, I agree with you - I think that most of the media tools that we use today could benefit from Miller Columns and a keyboard-driven design.... I'm interested in talking about UI affordances for power users - would you be interested? If so, drop me an email (you don't have your email in your HN profile, and in-thread discussion isn't a good use of HN space). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns [2] https://pharo.org/features.html https://pharo.org/features.html
- specialist 5y ago
  Hi. Thank you for leaning in, sharing your ideas. I'll check out Pharo. Peeking at it, it reminds me of a Smalltalk dev env. Cool. 1. Navigation For navigation, my blue sky notion is to have ad hoc hierarchies. So imagine allowing the user to reorder those Miller columns. And any metadata item can be used as a column. And then the hierarchy browser (Finder equiv) infers the new tree. This is probably called faceted navigation. So in the case of Haxplore, the columns for one nav view I want are 'Author', 'Date', 'Kind' (eg OC, Show, Ask). For music, I want a nav view to sort by Producer. For movies, views for Director and Writer. For podcasts, views for Guests and Topic. Any way, you get the idea. 2. Filtering All nav views should have filters. (I forget which IDE allowed this.) Not just Spotlight style results, or Amazon style faceted product searches. Because I still want to drill down thru the resultset using Miller columns. 3. Quantified Self Log all the activity and metrics client side. For podcasts and audio books, log when and where I was. For all content, record if I looked at it, how long I looked at it, if I just deleted or skipped, etc. My count of podcast subscriptions is ridiculous. But I'm afraid (FOMO) of deleting something I liked. My own metrics would help me manage my consumption. Creating ad hoc 'follow' subscriptions would be cool too. Remember HN commenters I liked. The podcast guests I liked. Ditto producers and directors. Etc.

rcarmo 5y ago

Nice, but I would like to have a mix between this, https://hackerweb.app https://hackerweb.app, and gmail. For instance, I keep hitting "?" for help and would love to have consistent navigation down to the content level.

umvi 5y ago

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 top 30 links (or more) would be nice.

pabue 5y ago
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?
- umvi 5y ago
  On vanilla HN, a story is roughly 30 pixels in height with 5 pixels of whitespace between stories: PostgreSQL 14 (postgresql.org) [20px tall] 399 points by jkatz05 2 hours ago [10px tall] [5px spacer] On Haxplore, a story is roughly 75 pixels tall with 32 pixels of spacing. If you decide to implement a high density mode (I would make sure other users beside me want this before doing that work), the primary concern IMO is just cramming more stories onto the page so users can scan down the page to read more story headlines without scrolling. That could be achieved many ways, but if it were me I would probably do a combo of reducing whitespace, reducing font size, and removing/consolidating story info (i.e. instead of URL having it's own line, move a truncated version of URL next to story title like vanilla HN does)
  - laumars 5y ago
    > If you decide to implement a high density mode (I would make sure other users beside me want this before doing that work), That’s a refreshingly humble request. So often in FOSS I see people demanding features, even being downright critical at times. It’s really nice seeing someone suggest their feature request might not be popular is rare. Thank you for restoring my faith in humanity :)

KronisLV 5y ago

This feels like a nice way to navigate websites, but at the same time looks way better than most of the keyboard driven interfaces (since the apps that are optimized for that are typically TUI)! In my eyes, that just proves the feasibility of the input method, as opposed to having to click around - it can work for a variety of types of content!

itsbits 5y ago

This is really really cool. I am gonna use it more. Couple of suggestions thgh. 1) Blurring can be avoided. 3) jump to parent story of any level comment via keyboard 2) Is there possibility of logging in? so that we can do comment/upvote/downvote as well via keyboard.

picardo 5y ago

Nice work. Minor issue, but when I open the Menu with M, the focus should be in the dropdown menu, so I can navigate it with the arrow up and down. Otherwise, works great!

pabue 5y ago
Thanks! You're right, that part is a bit weird. I added that in the last moment and didn't really spend much time on making in good.
- picardo 5y ago
  A couple of more ideas: * Some way to go to the top of the page without refreshing the page. * Some way to load new posts asynchronously without refreshing the page.
  - pabue 5y ago
    1. The last update added support for the page up, page down and home keys. That should make it easier to get back to the top. 2. Do you mean loading more posts when you reached the end of the list? This will also be added in one of the next few updates. Thank you!
    - picardo 5y ago
      > The last update added support for the page up, page down and home keys. That should make it easier to get back to the top. I use a Mac Air. I don't have these keys. > Do you mean loading more posts when you reached the end of the list? This will also be added in one of the next few updates. No, I mean the usecase when let's say I'm viewing a post or even when I'm on the home page, and I want to check if there have been new comments or new posts without reloading the page.

whage 5y ago

Fantastic job. I love that I can easily read breadth-first.

turtlebits 5y ago

Very cool! I think you should leave scrolling alone, the selection animation is too fast to read all the stories and comments as a list. Acting like a mobile OS picker is annoying. Also nitpick, Alt-H is not an easy key to hit on mac, why not just '?'

mlukaszek 5y ago

Like it! Some suggestions to consider: - I'm missing a "jump back up" shortcut, something I'd recommend using capital "G" for, like in Vim. - It seems it hits some hardcoded limit for paging? i.e. it does not allow me to open more stories once I reach the "bottom" one. - Two things I'm used to that exist in the Android app I'm using: * stories are numbered, so I see how far from the top I am. It's a dimmed down grey number, but it's there and I like it. * depending on the number of comments, an article can be marked as hot with a "fire" emoji. I got used to that to immediately spot things which are trending. Overall, well done! I am definitely subscribing, and I'll test if I can switch to it on Android. (edit: typos)

C19is20 5y ago
Agreed on android: materialistic?
- mlukaszek 5y ago
  Yes, materialistic is what I settled down on so far!
  - jimmySixDOF 5y ago
    You guys should check out HACK for HN , released in August - vs Materialistic which hasn't been touched in a long while.

JohnL4 5y ago

Content-free comment, but WOW this is really slick!

eigenrick 5y ago

Great design! Unfortunately it doesn't work on my setup. On Firefox on Linux with SwayWM None of the hotkeys work except the arrows and hjkl. Alt-h opens up mozilla's help menu. Enter opens up the site's help menu. (maybe because that was the last thing I clicked on?) And 'o' does nothing that I can tell.

yyyk 5y ago

I get "Error: No available storage method found." in console on Firefox-esr in incognito mode.

hidden-spyder 5y ago

Off topic, but where did you get the idea for the design? I love it! Not something I get to see regularly.

pabue 5y ago
Tbh I'm not sure. I think the idea for the control scheme came e from video game consoles like the Nintendo switch or PS. And the visual design is a result of a few iterations of trying to make it appealing while still keeping some of the spirit of HN.

porterbeats 5y ago

This is fantastic! Thank you for making this.

OrvalWintermute 5y ago

Really love the interface and how high performance it is. Very well thought out! I've been browsing through HN using Haxplore and I can really navigate fast! This is kinda like vi

SubiculumCode 5y ago

Why a client when the native HN interface is close to perfection?

dbbljack 5y ago

this seems really great for people who want vim in the... actually wait we all have browser extensions already.

message 5y ago

Love it! Great work <3

jobsort 5y ago

Is there a specific library or package folks use to enable hotkeys on a page, or is it commonly done via vanilla JS?

pabue 5y ago
I'm using hotkeys-js for most projects where hotkeys are a thing. You can do with vanilla js but it's a bit of work to do it right.

prohobo 5y ago

This is design. It's great, works well and does exactly what you'd want it to. The one issue I see (as others have mentioned) is that it's difficult to orient yourself because the app only allows focusing on one thing at a time.

flanbiscuit 5y ago

I love the keyboard navigation. Speaking of, on FF when I go to the Hacker News home page and I tab navigate, the only thing it can tab to is the search input at the bottom. Does anyone else have issues or is it just me?

shpongled 5y ago

I love it. I would kill for one for reddit too.

asdff 5y ago
rtv is an old standard tool that behaves similarly imo. I don't think its under active development anymore but it still works (i'm sure theres a fork or a similar reddit cli under active development these days)
Fraaaank 5y ago
Have you ever tried https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ ?

asdff 5y ago

I can't open comments on firefox. hitting O does nothing. Opening new links also opens them in a popup window rather than a new tab, so firefox blocks those by default too. Overall its nice to use a keyboard but the information density is so poor and the site isn't as performant as news.ycombinator.com so I won't be making a switch, and I can't comment on how it renders comments since it doesn't open comment sections in firefox at least. I've been on the hunt for a HN TUI client or some other way to make threads play nicely with a text based browser. That would really help with my newsboat based internet consumption if I didn't have to open a browser to read comment threads. I have gotten close, but with all the text based browsers I've tried, they all don't indent comments correctly in threads which makes it not very useful.

spiralx 5y ago
> I can't open comments on firefox. hitting O does nothing. Opening new links also opens them in a popup window rather than a new tab, so firefox blocks those by default too. Took me a while to realise you opened things by pressing the right arrow/D/K, and instead O and Alt+O open the current comment or article in HN. I'm not sure why they have different keypresses, makes it even more confusing.

cacois 5y ago

Phenomenal idea! Really great approach to forum UX. I sincerely hope you keep working on this, I'd love to see how it evolves.

pabue 5y ago
Wow, thanks! Don't worry, I will definitely keep working on it. With all that great feedback I don't think I have any other choice. ;)

gnull 5y ago

Being unable to see the whole (sub-)tree while reading the comments is a major disadvantage for me so far. If you read a thread that goes like a dialog with each new reply being nested under the previous one, this web app requires a key press to see each new reply — you never see them simultaneously. But this app is an interesting take. I'm also not happy with unnecessarily mouse-driven interfaces

qorrect 5y ago

I love it. Now put it in Emacs and we have a forever client.

muhammadusman 5y ago

I'm loving it, it's so fast!

danschumann 5y ago

Why doesn't the konami code work?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bilekas 5y ago

I absolutely love this. Super smooth, can it be applied to other feeds also ?

albert_e 5y ago

Kudos! This feels like something I have been sorely missing without knowing the words to express it. THANK YOU!

alexvoda 5y ago

Is it possible to add quick way to add a bookmark for a story or comment and a read leater stack?

picardo 5y ago

Some of the comments in here don't show up on Haxplore until much later. It looks like the API response is being cached... which gives me a pause because navigating the comments is the best part of Haxplore interface.

Invictus0 5y ago

I'd love if: * the site marked when I had already clicked a link * the site respected URLs so I can easily share links * I can read older HN links in your interface

pabue 5y ago
1. Great idea, this will be added in one of the next updates 2. This is planned also will also be added soon 3. How would you expect this to work? Would you want a search? Or an input for pasting HN links? Thank you!

ww520 5y ago

This looks excellent especially for keyboard navigation. May I give a suggestion? Add support for PgUp & PgDown to skip couple items, both in the post list view and the comment list view.

fouric 5y ago

This is a really interesting project. It's also incomplete - but, in fairness, building a HN client that most people would consider "complete" is a massive undertaking (HN login, themes, customizable keyboard shortcuts, mouse support, pre-fetching, "read" status markers). Instead, here's some feedback about the interesting/different parts of the design: 1. Having WASD, HJKL, and arrow-key navigation is nice - most tools commit to exactly one of those three. 2. I believe that not blurring the leftward (parent) column would be better than giving a toggle-able parent comment in the current column. 3. The keyboard shortcut + "Help" button in the corner is great - I regularly forget what bindings are available for a new tool that I'm in the first few minutes of using, and then often get bored and leave. 4. Placing the comment content all the way at the top of the box slightly encourages focus on that content, which is good - HN puts the username and posting age at the top instead, which is a distraction, and makes it slightly easier to think about users instead of content. 5. Lack of pagination is great - no more artificial second-page barrier. 6. You could use more of the screen space - for me, about a third is just empty, even when I zoom. Less interesting stuff: there's some visual rendering bugs of italics and the "M" menu isn't keyboard-navigable (this isn't meant to be a feature request; I know you're focused on making the site keyboard-driven). Congrats on making a relatively resource-efficient and visual-space-efficient web app!

stephencoyner 5y ago

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.

jamesbfb 5y ago

I see many different iterations of HN "clients/fontends/apps" posted here, this is by far my fav, and the first one I have bookmarked! The hjkl keybindings made my day :)

touristtam 5y ago

nice but I still like to use my mouse to navigate through a website.

firexcy 5y ago

Thank you for sharing this. HN’s default layout and behavior have never made sense to me and I always rely on alternative front-ends if I’m spending more than a glance on a thread. Currently I’m settled on hn.premii.com but your attempt seems promising. One suggestion: I know the client is designed to be a single-page app, but is it possible to have a constructed permalink for each submission and comment thereto? On hn.premii.com that I mentioned above, I can have links in the form of hn.premii.com/#/comments/28704873 so that I can create a bookmarklet to jump directly from a original HN page to a “optimized” version. I hope it will also be possible with yours.

devenvdev 5y ago

Well done! The only issue I have is that I receive top HN via Pushbullet, a link straight to HN, I wonder how can I quickly open a specific entry in Haxplore?

aaronpkelly 5y ago

Well done! This is the project I've been trying to build in my spare time, and you have beat me to it! I would also favour seeing a hn-theme that preserved the colours and fonts :)

Siira 5y ago

How do you scroll long comments without the mouse?

avaku 5y ago

I am still using this now, after 3 days, to read hacker news. I hope this project stays alive.

spurgu 5y ago

Hey, don't know if you're still reading, but the ability to sort frontpage by Best would be an awesome addition! Been using this for the last couple of days. There's a slight tradeoff due to not having a good overview of the "discussion tree", but overall it's a super smooth way of browsing HN!