Comment by Beltalowda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Beltalowda | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it.

I thought I was the only one with this habit hah!

IMHO this "close modal when clicking outside of it" is a UX pattern you need to be careful with in general, because it's easy to "miss" a click and accidentally close something, even without this habit. It's okay for some things that are truly temporary (i.e. delete confirmation dialogs and the like), but clearly not everything.

But hey, old.reddit.com still works, and is mostly okay.

> I don't click a cursed en.m.wikipedia link by accident

I got this extension to automatically redirect them: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ – also useful for some other things like redirecting Reddit to old.reddit.com, and PostgreSQL documentation links to /current/ rather than /9.4/ and such which still frequently show up in search results.

> I thought I was the only one with this habit hah!

Nope. I think I would gladly institute capital punishment for people who institute pop-ups on highlighted text. "Oooh, you highlighted a passage of text, would you like to tweet it (with a link to source and user tracked)?"

No. I was reading that. ** off.

Outlook.com is particularly as depending on my random clicks I can end up with "new email + quote" or "new Note" or some other thing.

Some things I've managed to murder with adblock rules but really I'd just like my browser to not show the relevant triggers.

The "New Email + Quote" thing gets me frequently, the quoted text below will just be some random section of text and I have to go back, deselect the text, and start a new email.

I also thought I was the only one. To be fair, my text-painting is half readability enhancement and half fidgeting. I am kind of annoying in pair programming sessions.

I find it really hard to read large sections of text on a screen without the highlighted text play that somehow anchors my view (this is a largely subconscious process I think).

But yeah, my wife will go batshit when trying to read the same thing over my shoulder. "Just stop, I can't read when you do that"

GitLab's diff or Code Review has an extremely annoying feature for people who fidget with text, especially when dragging text.

In addition to highlighting and "painting" the text, I often click and drag the highlighted text around. If some text is dragged onto the code view in Firefox, the dropped text seems to be treated like URLs, and opened either in new tabs or in the current tab.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/uploads/666d09080e20ea8...

If gitlab allows uploads by dropping files outside of the textarea, it might be a bug related to that (either in the browser or more likely in gitlab). This is standard for dragging urls or files into the browser from outside when the website isn't a drop target, afaik. You might be able to write a user script to disable it.

Alternatively, if you feel like rebuilding Firefox yourself, it looks like nsBaseDragService.cpp _might_ help you with preventing stuff from being dropped anywhere; I haven't read the whole file, but going by the name, overriding aCanDrop and mCanDrop to false might help. See lines 62, 84, 92. This _might_ allow you to continue dragging stuff around but disable dropping stuff.

[1]: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/nsBaseDr...

I’m 90% sure I’ll be done with Reddit if they ditch old view. It’s honestly that integral for me lol

The old.reddit redirect and RES are really the only reason I've continued to use the site at all.

With a well curated selection of subreddits (and removal of a lot of the "default" ones) it's actually really good. My brain naturally starts going "these links aren't really interesting anymore" after 100-200 links, and I task switch as a result.

If you are on iOS, the Apollo app makes Reddit a joy to use again.

Same. I have like 3 default subs subbed and a few really, really niche ones.

I share your affinity to the older reddit ui but why bother using an addon for redirecting when you can opt out of the redesign in settings instead.

This way I don't need to sign in or remember cookies.

Because a) they randomly toggle your setting back, and don’t respect it at all on mobile, and b) features are slowly breaking on the old UI as well: gallery links not working, the “report” button taking seconds to load and then having a modal that breaks interoperability and hijacks Esc.

> hijacks Esc

I hate squarespace with a passion for this. I'll be loading a forum or other page and hit esc to stop the page from loading. It works--but a few seconds later, it prompts me to log into the CMS/management.

As far as modals go, I actively want modals to respond to esc. I don't want to have to reach for my mouse to close a pop-up. Modal popups are the only thing that should hijack esc.

AND SOMETIMES IT USES history.replace()

WHYYYyy

I "paint" text as well.

Sometimes I need to zoom and paint to improve the contrast of something. Even on HN for downvoted things, sometimes that helps.

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