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Comment by thewebguyd | Hacker News Reader

As someone who used to use native RSS readers a ton back in the day, the limited web browser usually isn't a problem for just reading a few articles.

I like native apps for things, even link aggregators, because my I want to use my OS's native window management and app management instead of just shoving everything into a browser tab, of which I already have too many. Because then it's just CMD+Tab to Chrome, and then figure out which of the 20+ tabs I'm trying to get to instead of CMD+Tab directly to that specific app.

Anyway, just a bit of old man yelling at cloud but I've always disliked the proliferation of "web app all the things." Might as well not even use a desktop OS at this point and just have a full screen browser window and call it a day.

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I'm trying to understand your position here. An app with it's own way to manage multiple browser windows is better, because you have too many tabs open in your browser. If you have multiple links open, the tab management is now a problem in your desktop app instead of the browser. If you don't, then you don't have to manage tabs anyway. What does this solve that a separate browser window doesn't, except not having any way to add extensions like ad blockers or tampermonkey scripts etc?

if you read HN a lot, then it makes sense to have have native app for it

you might not be aware of how how much power is at your fingertips on a Mac with a tool like Hammerspoon plus some other utilities

obviously you can bind the app with it's own shortcut without calling my entire browser, but I can move it to any part of any of my monitors easy with my one handed shortcuts: https://gist.github.com/pazimzadeh/b1c70f5f205d0b63264e7c021... you get the gist https://github.com/peterklijn/hammerspoon-shiftit

I guess you could make a web app or app clip but I think this is a cool project. would be good to have a theme engine.

Look at NetNewsWire how good a native app of this kind can be. NNW in particular has great shortcuts, like or opening links in the native browser, and read/unread functionality

I usually don't have multiple HN articles open at a time, but I can see how that would just be replacing one problem (too many browser tabs) for a worse problem (too many, now limited, browser tabs).

It's just nice to have HN as it's own app instead of just another tab in a single app. Same reason I use mail.app vs. webmail, native music app vs the web player, etc.

PWAs also solve the problem, more or less, but it is nice to have something native.

If you want to use your native window manager, why don’t you just disable tabs and have every link open a new browser window?

On MacOS that would be an amazing poor UX, cmd+tab works on Applications, not specific windows.

Switching windows within the same Application is cmd+` ; and only works on the current workspace.

What about using AltTab?

https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos

I agree it would be a poor experience, but macOS does have an additional shortcut key for switching between windows: Command–Grave accent (`)

did…

did I not mention that?

I was severely jetlagged when I replied. Apologies for restating things. The suggestion seemed to me to be limited to browser windows

You absolutely did, but are you not aware that cmd+` allows you to switch between windows?

only with the same application, and on the same virtual desktop (which is what i said).

i am confused here now, what do you mean that i am missing?

What you are thinking about is provided by a third-party app (AltTab). It was never a part of the system.

Isn’t what a chromebook is all about? (And yes, I hate it too.)

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