Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a little meta, but I'd like to get a second opinion before I bother the moderators by email.

(1) Does anyone know why the preformatted sections (<pre>) are limited to a width smaller than the width of the post? At all widths, it's roughly 75% of the comment's width. For mobile, this is especially bad, but I'm not sure why it's there on normal screens resolutions either.

(2) You could test different widths. Right click the preformatted section and choose "inspect element". You should have the <code> block highlighted. Move to the parent element, the <pre>. On the right, you should see a max-width with some pixel value. Try setting that to "100%" (without quotes) rather than some pixel amount. Does that work fine for you? Would you like that change? It would be great if someone could somehow test this on mobile as well, but on desktop (if I resize the browser) it seems to work well.

View on HN

Longstanding request, and I've emailed HN on this point repeatedly.

I'm given to understand changes may be in the offing, though whether or not this specifically is addressed, I'm not sure.

On desktop browsers with extension support, you can use Stylus to fix this specific annoyance by setting "pre-wrap: word".

And yes, blockquote support would be hugely appreciated.

FYI: https://lobste.rs offers full Markdown for comments.

Continuing the tangent... I wonder why HN isn't open source?

It used to be, maybe it still is https://github.com/wting/hackernews (7 years ago)

Iirc they didn't want to publish details of the ranking algorithm at some point, to prevent "hacking" of submissions.

Maybe they stopped publishing the code since then.

> pre-wrap: word

they would only need to add this to the CSS, yes? then you get the same four-spaces code block, but it doesn't cause horizontal scrollbars any more.

HN admins, could you please add this?

Please don't: when used for code, preserving lines (even when requiring scrolling on mobile) is a good thing. 100% width is fine, no reason it needs to be as narrow as it is.

If a blockquote format is desired, that's great, but don't change the code formatting to make it a slightly-less bad (but still horrible, because of monospacing) way of presenting blockquotes.

How about a few profile fields where users can customize some aspects of the HN CSS that is used just for them when they are logged in.

You know, like how there is "topcolor" already; just a bit more of the same.

Yes.

And on copy/paste, the linebreaks in the original are preserved, which obviates the code objection answering you below.

lobste.rs is infinitely more advanced than HN, interface-wise (and it's also perfectly lightweight, so that's no excuse for HN to hide under)

Legacy and data conversion may well be issues.

Front end is not back end, etc.

Archive, transfer user database, and deprecate is common for web forums if an upgrade is needed.

anyone have an invite code handy?

to get even more meta: can we please have a proper blockquote format on HN so that people stop doing this silly code formatting?

I'm personally fine with using the > symbol at the beginning of quoted lines, not sure why people see the need to indent every line with four spaces, that's torture for both the writer and the reader (sideways scrolling long lines, and monospaced doesn't read nicely either). But I'm fine either way, so if there is a small css change that people seem to be in favor of which I (or someone else) can propose, that's probably easier than selling a new feature to the whole community, so I'd like to focus on that here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com