Show HN: Minimal Twitter – drastically simplify and declutter the new Twitter UI | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Minimal Twitter – drastically simplify and declutter the new Twitter UI

typefully.com

93 points_tuh345 comments

If you're taking suggestions, I think a three-column format would be cool. Basically, the first column is the thin icons you have now. The second column is the tweet column. The third column (equal in size to the second column) would appear when you click on a tweet; instead of loading the responses to that tweet as a modal view as it does now, the responses would appear in the right column.

Basically, this would make Twitter a lot more like several email clients or an RSS reader. Quick and dirty mockup: https://i.imgur.com/Uh9Rbcz.png

Also, would be nice to force Twitter into "latest tweets" mode, and also to provide a userscript for those of us who prefer to avoid untrusted addons.

Interesting, sounds challenging! Would you mind adding this to the issues? Maybe someone will be able help me tackle it then https://github.com/thomaswangio/minimal-twitter/issues

Neat idea for showing off your design chops. I don’t use Twitter so I don’t have much feedback, other than your ad blocking code being brittle [1].

[1] https://github.com/thomaswangio/minimal-twitter/blob/e076507...

Thanks for pointing that out, I think I might remove it. Will cause more trouble down the road. Do you have any ideas to make it more safe?

Unfortunately, I can’t think of any. Twitter could arbitrarily change where those elements are placed in the DOM at any time (and they probably will to prevent other extensions from blocking promoted tweets). I would just consider this out of the scope of your project and not bother handling it.

Totally agreed, definitely out of scope. Just removed the script from the manifests. Thanks again!

Thomas, I like your work. Just joined your newsletter. Would be interested to talk. I'm @ www.sendsmart.com

Sure, I'm at thomas [at] wang.sh!

You could potentially keep searching upwards for a parentNode that has role="article". While Twitter could change their markup significantly they sorta have to support screen readers so aria attributes will poke through here and there.

Hmmm interesting, if you have some time I'd love a PR. It would be a nice feature to have tbh

Just installed the Safari extension. It makes the new Twitter bearable. Excellent work!

Apple should really rethink their extension strategy. Other platforms require a click of a button. Safari requires either going through the App Store, or doing Dev Mode shenanigans.

Agreed, we can all understand legitimate security/quality concerns, but their current policy prevents some great extensions from reaching a wider audience.

If I could make a feature request, one more removal: the giant fixed blue button in lower right. Still can't believe twitter designers thought covering content with a control is a good idea on mobile.

Thank you for a wonderful plugin.

Ah yes I meant to make that an option in the Chrome extension. It'll be in the next update!

Done! https://github.com/thomaswangio/minimal-twitter/releases/tag...

At the other extreme, I want an interface that graphically depicts full graph tree of tweets (replies and commented RTs). On a tablet, show the entire tree on one screen.

Came in expecting Emacs. Noticed a sidebar, icons, bold, separators, user profile photos. Not quite minimalist yet! At the end of the day, Twitter can look like IRC.

early twitter had a really great xmpp bot (official!) that was super easy to use and amazing to consume twitter. it really felt like a huge IRC room.

i kind of miss that.

Bitlbee can do that! https://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoTwitter

Does it still work after the recent API changes that killed Tweetbot and other apps? I had this set up a few years ago and miss it but assumed it was done for alongside the others.

Mozilla Thunderbird has twitter client I like look of it[0]

[0] https://i.ibb.co/V3mwyvB/image.png

I don't have "new Twitter" so I can't test this yet, but Safari users can probably use the (for-sale-on-App-Store) Cascadea extension and plug in the stylesheet from https://github.com/thomaswangio/minimal-twitter/blob/master/...

Random tip: If you have the tamper monkey browser extension [1], you can simply add `document.querySelector('[data-testid="sidebarColumn"]').remove()` to remove the second sidebar on page load to make it feel minimal without much effort.

[1] https://www.tampermonkey.net/

Does Twitter really publish its test selectors in production?

is there a good reason that this would be bad practice? it's much more friendly to the end user than uglifying your html with randomly generated ids on every div!

I usually strip them out during builds that target production. They’re just noise in that environment.

Or you can just do this in Stylus:

    div[data-testid="sidebarColumn"] {
        display: none;
    }

Also, since Tampermonkey is closed source, it's probably better to use Greasemonkey or Violentmonkey.

Great suggestion. Didn't know that

Have you been able to get this to work? I can't get Stylus to override any styles on the new Twitter site.

Yep, it's working for me now. Latest Firefox on MacOS. Maybe check if the "test" CSS class appears in the source for you. If not there's probably an obfuscated class you can target instead.

Interesting - this works just fine in Firefox, but the same styles in the Stylus extension for Chrome aren't working. I can see them in the DOM, they just aren't having any effect on the page. I've tried targeting both the testid and the classes and neither seem to work on Chrome.

As I recall Twitter has some fairly strict CSP rules, and extensions have had problems with them in the past. Maybe the Stylus extension can bypass rules in Firefox that it's not able to in Chrome?

The left-nav hover is a good balance UX that's no harm to be official. Thanks for making this. Installed!

I honestly like the new Twitter UI. It's more usable for me than the previous design.

when will someone release a hack that inverts feed order?

I don't know about the rest of you, but I browse the web in English, which is read left to right and top to bottom.

Can this be made available for brave browser too?

Brave is Chromium, you should be able to install the Chrome extension.

Yes! You can install Chrome extensions on Brave https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017909112-How...

Url changed from https://twang.dev/minimal-twitter/.

Edit: and thence to https://www.wang.sh/minimal-twitter/ (by author's request)

hey good work! just to let you know hidden navigation labels working only in english language.

Oh really? Thanks for the catch. Can you throw me an issue on GitHub, I'll see if I can tackle it or someone else can pick it up https://github.com/thomaswangio/minimal-twitter/issues/new

Where are the trends?

They're in twitter.com/explore :)

It looks very similar to Medium.

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