Hacker News Reader

Comment by Santosh83 | Hacker News Reader

This isn't average user friendly. No one except nerds will remember these symbols. Why not simply make it so that typing !history ____ will search history, !bookmarks ___ will search bookmarks and so on? This at least stands a chance of being used more widely.

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That's why there's a UI affordance for it: look at the bottom of the suggestions list.

These are just power user shortcuts.

I wish the tags would automatically populate when you used one of the shortcuts just as they do when you click on the UI.

There should be no difference between the two ways if you enter a space after the special character.

This only works if you put the special character in the beginning and not at the end e.g. if I type "hacker news %" it still only filters by open tabs, but it doesn't show the "Tabs x" label (whether I add a space or not). Which is how I use it 99% of the time, since I only need to add special characters if it wasn't already finding what I meant without them.

(Not that I mind personally, since I'm already familiar with the feature)

That was my first thought. I will literally never use any of these simply because I can't remember all of them. !h __, !b __, or !a __ would be something I could possibly remember.

EDIT: To be clear I hate being a downer here. But I will never use these. Nobody I work with will ever use them either. This is for the 1% of the 1% and a few minor tweaks would make it actually useful with the default bindings.

You could use the GUI buttons that appear at the bottom of the suggestions - they even show the respective special character in the tooltip.

Exactly. Just give us a way to set which results we want first.

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