Available for Firefox and Chrome:

Description

Hacker News Userscript - a Browser Extension to Play Hide and Seek!

The Usescript is written in Rust with Web Assembly compile target. Based on the Mubelotix's Wasm Extension Template.

The extension provides features, which allow users to filter submissions based on a text or a regular expression:

• Filter submissions by text in title or link
• Filter comments by text
• Hide submissions and comments from a specific user
• Get visual feedback on how many items were hidden by a particular filter
• Toggle hide of all the children for a hidden parent comment
• Show [hidden] placeholder in place of hidden items
• Hide an individual submission, without auto-loading the next one. You can hide everything on the page, and it will stay blank!

Uses Rust's Regex to enable expression matching. Regardless of regex usage, matches by text as a substring in an item

All the filtering data and settings are stored in the localstorage.

See the videos below for the features showcase!

Features Showcase

softhide.mp4

filter-by-title.mp4

filter-by-username.mp4

Local Development and Installation

For the local development, a convenient flake.nix with devshell is provided.

1. Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/drakerossman/hackernews-userscript

2. If not already, install the nix package manager via Determinate Systems' nix installer:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- install

It will walk you through the installation process via easy-to-follow prompts. You will also be prompted for sudo.

3. Navigate to the cloned repo's directory and invoke the devshell:

cd hackernews-userscript
nix --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' develop

After fetching the files, all the tools required for compilation and development should be made ready-available in the new shell.

4. Build the extension for chrome and firefox:

./build.sh

To load extension in Chrome:

• navigate to chrome://extensions/
• enable Developer Mode by clicking the toggle switch next to Developer mode.
• use Load unpacked and select the extension directory - pkg/chrome

To load extension in Firefox:

• navigate to about:debugging
• click "This Firefox"
• use Load Temporary Add-on, navigate to the extension directory, and select any file from the root of the directory - pkg/firefox/background-worker.js

For Contributors

PRs are always welcome, especially if:

• you can make the interface prettier and more erogonomic
• you know how to optimize regex so it won't spend a full second on parsing one
• you are eager to refactor the codebase

Please mind, that I have been developing this extension on NixOS via the provided devShell in flake.nix.

For whatever reason, should you also use NixOS, and should the path to the folder of this project contain spaces, the compilation via build.sh would fail with the following error:

error: linking with `cc` failed: exit status: 1

Coming Soon

• Highlighting by topic
• Endless scrolling
• Thread auto-update
• Background thread watcher
• Codebase refactoring
• Replies, subscriptions
• Group items by topics
• Chronological comments with reply links
• Easy point-and-click to filter an item
• Collapsible sidebar
• Better UI
• Favorites functionality
• Automatically mark already-read submissions and comments
• Export and import filters and settings
• Infotips on hover

In the Future

• Safari support, mobile support
• Local-first cloud sync between devices
• Support for other websites
• Social collaborative filtering

Sponsor This Project

You can sponsor this work, as well as other projects of mine via Liberapay and Patreon: