Hacker News Reader

Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

I wish they would update the line-height to something more reasonable. ~1.5x font size would be go a long way in paragraph readability. Other than that, it's fast and stable. About all I require from a forum.

Edit: All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don't want to install addons/mods/hacks to fix line-height.

View on HN

Another awesome thing about simple sites like this is you can hack the CSS really easily with something like Stylus.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/styl-us/

You can literally do something like what parent comment wanted to do in three (3) minutes, including installing the addon. Stylus is great.

Yes, it is good. (I tend to only use it for sites that already use CSS; for those that don't, the default is almost always good enough.) Even on Hacker News, I use that to do two things: to make all comment text black, and to display dotted lines for the comment indentation to make it more easily to be seen the indentation level (it is implemented as simply a tiling background picture). (For more complicated web pages, I often need to add a lot more stuff to make it work reasonably.)

HN is trivially editable with userstyles. I personally use one for a dark theme; I think you can install a userstyle of your choosing on all browsers from which you access HN.

Edit: All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don't want to install addons/mods/hacks to fix line-height.

The line-height looks perfectly fine to me. AFAIK the HN CSS doesn't force any specific height but uses the defaults. In fact I'm sick of the "modern" absurdly-low-density design trend that just makes me need to scroll more to see less.

My browser has a zoom function, and so should yours. I don't understand the resistance against customising a site --- it is a user agent working for you, and the CSS spec even mandates a user-stylesheet (which I know some browser(s) blatantly disregard). Different users will obviously have different preferences.

my default zoom is 150%. this breaks a lot of websites. but maybe they don't care about accessibility anyway. like OP said, i have not had any issue with HN for years.

i recently started keeping dev tools's console open when i am using chrome. i have some JS to collapse comments here on HN.

i have seen some interesting things in the console, i just keep it opened now:

- some sites have st tons of JS errors and yet function as normal

- some companies put job ads in there for JS people (medium is doing it right now)

- some libraries show off their awesome ASCII logos in the console

- debug statements are left there unintentionally (i wonder if there is no tool that could strip these out)

Does your JS do something differently than HN's native comment-collapsing? You can just click the "[-]" at the end of each comment's "header".

What sites does zoom break? I've been on a 2x DPI screen for years and never noticed anything. The web is pretty good about this, even "pixels" are actually just length units not physical pixels.

Very few work correctly with zoom. One of them is http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

And text has nothing to do with pixels, it's not raster.

Can you give an example of one that works poorly with zoom? Like I said literally all of the browsing I've done in the last couple of years on my work PC has been with 200% zoom and I've never noticed a site be broken/different to my 100% setup.

I suppose if you have e.g. a 720p screen and do 200% zoom you might run into some problems but that's got little to do with zoom and more to do with the lack of space on your screen to put content anymore.

YC, reddit, wikipedia, github, SO (very horrible), all google sites.

Lack of space is not really a thing for html, rarely a page fits on screen without scroll and wrap.

For PC Chromium based browsers - use the extension "Zoom Text only." Allows you to - well, the name is self explanatory.

For Firefox - no extension needed. Press alt to show the main menu. Go to View -> Zoom - then select Zoom Text only.

Now, zoom will only increase font size, instead of the whole page.

All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don't want to install addons/mods/hacks to fix line-height

I have, but it's a mark of frustration for me. It definitely falls under the heading of, "The user shouldn't have to do this."

In Safari: View → Zoom In

It's smart enough to remember the zoom level the next time you open HN too.

That's not increasing line-height. I don't have a problem with my eyesight, I have a problem with poor typography.

And I have a problem with acres of whitespace. Here's one vote for HN to leave the line height right where it is.

How do you live with a centered fixed-width table that is wasting 15% of the browser window with nothing but hectares of white space then? Bumping the line-height to 1.5ish the font size has minimal impact to space efficiency, and add tons to readability.

I get by

> And I have a problem with acres of whitespace.

We're talking about just 1.5x line height. Which is a perfectly reasonable default for nice reading. The browsers have a lower default line height because of historical reasons, doesn't mean it's the right one. People don't use the Times font very often either.

Isn't that something that can be fixed with user-side CSS rules? EG, this for Firefox: https://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/how-to-override-c...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com