8 ms·

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 wi

by 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.

by pabue 5y ago

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.