Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericsanchez | Hacker News Reader

hacker news has been incredibly influential on me in exemplifying what a site could be.

I too have been thinking about the philosophy of a minimal amount of "design." After a certain point or certain amount of "design" I feel like we have to ask ourselves, "what's it all for?" I've been getting into more front end territory and have been delighted with how much HTML does.

For me, it's not so much about minimalism. I feel that minimalism semantically conveys, "the absolute bare minimum possible." Whereas I like to see the design goal as, "what is necessary to fulfill the required purpose."

Shameless little plug here, this is a little experiment I've been working on:

erictheread.org

View on HN

if it had [?] == list of keyboard accelerators, and honours the vi hjkl/asdf type keying for steerage, it would be better.

if it did that, and had some elements at top and bottom of the list, so you can [more] even from the top of the new view..

I could not agree more; especially with the vi advice. I'm still a work in progress, but I agree this would be cool. (I have `ESC` remapped to `JJ` and I find myself trying to exit insert mode in emails, papers, etc. all the time...)

I've also structured the site in a way so that it kind of has a schema for each article and the next step was to write a little client so one could read from a terminal.

Baked into my design philosophy is "reuse" hence not opting for a custom light-to-dark-toggle. Thanks for this though, I'd just reminds me I gotta keep it up ha. Do you think browsing in the terminal would be a hassle for people?

I'm also trying not to go too far overboard, thanks!

Do you think browsing in the terminal would be a hassle for people?

No. the basics of the site make this close to zero cost and proof-by-example is the alternate textual views of the site which just work (tm)

I am trying not to be a google fanboi, but the ubiquitous consistency of keyboard accelerators in gmail, photos, docs, &c by google is one of the reasons I enjoy using their tools. They "get" keyboard warriors, in the browser.

I like that. I feel similarly towards apple products. The consistency of these google products &/or the seamless-ness of apple products means that I can focus on what's important to me.

Good tools feel like good tools. Had to re-read,"ubiquitous consistency," nice. Thanks for the value added.

Nah, vim controls are best left to extensions like Pentadactyl or Vimium. No need to have every site on the web implementing their own version.

I don't agree. I tried these, some time ago (I admit) and found it a less than stellar experience. It actually isn't about vi vs emacs, its about 'have sensible keyboard shortcuts' and 'have shortcuts consistent with the industry'

It's less than stellar, but still a lot better than the defaults.

I think the content and the controls should be kept separate without messing with the other, that applies to websites hijacking the scrolling as well as others trying to do creative Vim keybindings. I wish Vim browser plugins were comparable to a solution like qutebrowser though, Surfingkeys(which I use) is pretty good but the input delays of those plugins are frustrating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com