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HN is great for the links people share, but a big part of the value I get comes from reading the discussion around them. I realized I was always opening the article in one tab and the comments in another, constantly switching back and forth.
I figured there was probably a simpler way, so I threw together this userscript to merge the two.
1. Clicking a link from Hacker News opens the article with a side panel containing the discussion. It doesn't require your credentials, is resizable, and is easy to tweak if you want to customize it.
2. If you land on an article that has previously been shared on HN, the script finds the existing discussion and adds a button in the top-right to open the panel.
Feedback welcome.
Discussion (99 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Feature 1 is IMO less useful. It just suggests that people are bad at window management. We didn't like overlapping windows and finding them, so we created tabs inside windows. Then we wanted to see two things at the same time, so we created split views inside tabs (Chrome and Firefox both had this). With a good window manager neither would be necessary. Sadly the community prefers to solve this at the application level rather than the desktop level; I'm currently using Forge (https://github.com/forge-ext/forge) but sadly it's becoming unmaintained.
Not only does it "prefer", they actually enforce this. I haven't found any sensible way of completely disabling tabs in either Firefox or Chromium. FF has some janky extension that kinda sorta works, but it's a hideous workaround consisting of hiding the tab bar and automatically detaching most new tabs. With the rest of the tabs, you're SOL. Haven't found anything at all for chrome.
I very much prefer managing windows with my my... window manager. Which works the same way with all applications.
I got used to opening a new tab for things to read before RSS first invented. So I guess it became a 2nd nature. I also think it is better to read the article first before going to the comments session. So Feature 1 isn't that useful.
For feature 2 it is great. Although thinking about it I kind wish this could be done without browser extension but an actual site feature by HN.
So that any application could have tabs, if the desktop manager would allow you to group windows as such. Same with showing a split view within such a tab as well.
I think I agree with that. I could imaging that the browser containers of tabs would make a ton of sense if I could make a container of windows handled as tabs across different applications at the window manager level.
All that being said, navigation in such a structure would be a mess that would need a lot of learning. Also I’m sure a window manager like this already exists somewhere.
A system wide search within tabs would help more maybe.
Like chrome’s cmd+A but for all tabs everywhere
The general problem is that having WM handle in-app tabs means the WM has to support every single hare-brained idea about meaning and role of tabs that app developers invent, which is infeasible. Even with browsers - until recently, you had like just two types of tabs: regular tabs, and porn-mode (er, "private browsing") tabs. Then came "account containers" or whatever it was in Firefox. Then came tab groups, reading groups, and tons of other nonsense.
OTOH, I can dream of an ideal world where the OS manages all tabs for all apps via combination of Sidebery (better "tree style tabs") and a tiling WM.
I only keep tabs open that I'm actively working on right now (or am imminently about to switch back to). I regularly close tabs (and windows for that matter) that are only open because I forgot about them, or that I might use again but not until hours or days later. If I need them later I just open them again.
For me, having hundreds of things open at once just creates clutter that makes it harder to focus.
Using Sidebery panes and treestyle tabs makes it really easy to organize your tabs, I have a tree with all my tasks with relevant documentation or subtasks under each task, and I have a separate panes with all the documentation I refer constantly at the top and everything I'm reading right now at the bottom. I definitely have a lot of tabs I opened to read and never closed, but that doesn't matter since everything is arranged in an approximation of a 2D space, I still know where to look for something specific. I'm sure you feel this is weird because you've never used a tree-style tab manager, but personally I can't go back to a regular browsing setup.
There are sadly hardly any WMs now with tabs, so having them support tree style tabs as well doesn't look too realistic.
1. If you name your script with the extension .user.js it is easier to click on to automatically install at least with tampermonkey. 2. When I went to this link from the main page, on mobile I had to scroll to the right to see the (-) to minimize because the sidebar was too large: https://elizabethtai.com/2026/06/10/substack-writers-you-nee... It may make some sense to start minimized so I can read the article first, but I can easily modify the script to do that.
A userscript also let me iterate quickly without dealing with extension packaging and permissions, but being able to see and tweak the code was a big part of the appeal.
Apart from that, there are APIs exclusive to extensions, e.g. instrumenting client-side communication among tabs with different origins, listing all tabs, basically accessing a special API that sits on a higher-level context, and, while gating certain functionality behind user approval, and forbidding other functionality completely (at least in Manifest 3.0), extensions with the corresponding permissions can do more than a script running in the page context. They can inject these as well, though, even overriding CSP sometimes, as far as I know?
The main problem with these permissions, and WebExtension 3.0 partly was an attempt to improve this, or at least claims it: most people give a second of doubt at best when installing an extension, as long as they think it comes from a trusted source.
thought I realize "if it works it works", https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey
I would say only go for extensions over userscript if you need a settings menu (or any of the APIs the sibling comment mentions).
https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button
My project is somewhat different from the userscript in that mine uses Bloom filters to check whether a link has been submitted, whereas this userscript sends every page you visit to the Algolia search API. Using Bloom filters means that there are no external requests unless you actually press the button. My project also doesn't show the comments in a sidebar.
Having a link to past discussions, whether using this userscript or my extension, is useful not only to read the comments for a page you're browsing, but also to find good sites that haven't been submitted yet!
It was 50/50, with HN on the left, so maybe it's not as easy to read the post in smaller windows. Otherwise, seems to provide the same service, essentially.
Edge had the open links in the other split, chrome doesn't
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/split-view-firefox
I generally open the HN comment link, then click the article link, read it, then click back to read the comments.
I'll see if this split view feature works better for me though, but I think I'd prefer a horizontal split instead of vertical.
If any of those vim extensions support link+split, and allow interaction with splits that would be even better.
https://github.com/twalichiewicz/HNewhere/issues/2
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-saved-y...
Also much easier to glance over what a user script is doing vs. unpacking some extension and then finding the actual business logic in all the wrapper code.
What I do now is open the HN comments, and then when I'm ready to look at the link + comments, right-click on the title and Open in Split View.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-saved-y...
Instead of browsing across sites, you’d be browsing across communities seeing the same site.
Disqus existed, but it worked because every page was completely independent. The discussion only existed embedded on the page.
My use case, even on phone:
View HN
Right click link to open in new tab OR: tap/hold a link then open I a new window.
What problem is this solving?
Would you be interested in making one?
It seems the software productivity has exploded in the agent era. However, do we treat every point of daily experience seriously enough? Do we recognize such pains actively and try to eliminate them (often easy), or just tolerate infinitely?
In the excludes, did you mean *.bank.com, or *bank.com?
Or maybe even *bank*.*!
The uploads to greasy fork seem reduced these days.
I've updated to v1.4.5 which now allows you to drag the toggle button anywhere you want on screen, and added the collapsed-by-default behavior on mobile.
That said, in case it helps anyone else, my usual flow is to middle-click (by clicking my mouse wheel) both the link and the comments link which opens each in a new background tab (at least in Chrome). Hopefully that's lower-friction than what you were doing with the two tabs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12898366
Note: I took it down when it seemed it could degrade HN quality if people used it as normal comments, but yours is great since it's the opposite target/usage
I normalize the URL and use HN's Algolia search API to find an existing story with a matching URL. I don't currently handle multiple HN submissions of the same article; I just use the matching story I find.
That being said, I could see creating a historical snapshot of all the times an article has been submitted and building a blended comments section in the future.
https://github.com/twalichiewicz/HNewhere/releases/tag/v1.4....
You can test with https://www.apple.com/iphone/
https://github.com/rzagreb/hackernews-top-rss
This is actually how I found this article as well
This shouldn't be a script (no offense, great job!). It should be built into the browsers!
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-saved-y...
currently rocking 666 users... https://oj-hn.com
I'm working on a fix, but in the meantime you can add `@exclude https://chatgpt.com/*` to the userscript header.
EDIT: Added this to the v1.4.0 release just now.
classic beginner error, in fact no one is supposed to click on TFA
1. open the comments page
2. select the comment box
3. judge the linked content by its HN title alone and get ready to post
/s