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Comment by marpstar | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad the author mentioned the thing that I dislike most about Medium: the "share" tooltip that appears any time you highlight anything in the article. I realize that they consider this a value prop (and it certainly hasn't hurt their ability to grow) but for those of us who highlight text as we read, it's incredibly annoying.

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It's very annoying, but thankfully reader mode in every browser gets rid of it and every other annoyance medium has, including popups.

Reader mode is definitely a very important part of the modern web experience. A rather sad truth.

I recently also found a Firefox extension [1] I'd been looking for a some time: a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com. This makes browsing Medium much nicer.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com

Safari has this built-in.

Enter reader mode on a web page, then right-click on the reader icon and you can set every page in the domain to automatically display in reader mode.

Safari isn't usually the first with new features, so it might be available in other browsers, as well.

Damn’ thanks ! Awesome ! I just discovered it’s also working on iOS with a long press on the reader button

Same here, highlighting the text helps me keep track of the paragraph i'm reading and I was annoyed by this feature as well. On a related note, I've been looking for a plugin that highlights lines/paragraphs of text and is controlled by the cursor keys up/down (for desktop viewing only) but haven't been able to find such a thing yet. I keep on hoping that one day somebody would come up with such a thing.

I think Vimium [0] would allow you to highlight lines with hjkl keys. They have a "Visual Select" mode that'll highlight lines as if it were in VI [1].

[0] Google Chrome Extension: https://github.com/philc/vimium

[1] https://github.com/philc/vimium/wiki/Visual-Mode

Tangentially related: Evernote Premium does this when you highlight-as-you-read on PDFs. They assume you want to annotate all the time. I would rather press a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut to bring up an annotation, like the way it works on Preview.app.

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