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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I built a Hacker News userscript to make this site more legible

My personal itch to scratch just recently has been the umpteen formatting foibles of HackerNews. So, in the spirit of making the web more personal again, I knocked up a TamperMonkey userscript to fix up the worst of my personal bugbears. This isn't an attempt at a complete rebrand/redesign of the site, instead it's just fixing up what I think are the biggest design/readability issues whilst trying to remain true to the site's existing aesthetic. Key features: * Base font size increased * A little more room around headings * Top menu bar is full-width and with a little more padding…

This is a TamperMonkey userscript that improves the readability of Hacker News by adjusting typography and layout. It increases base font size, adds spacing around headings, expands the top menu bar, makes downvoted… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. I built a Hacker News userscript to make this site more legible launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

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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…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hey HN, I made this free browser extension that modernizes the Hacker News design. I previously launched Modern for Wikipedia [1] here back in December, and it seemed like the obvious next choice to build one for HN too! So I've taken what I learned from building that, and have spent all my spare time this year building Modern for HN. I realize this won't be for everyone, but it was a fun project to work on, and I'm really happy with the result so far. Hope you like it too! Lots more planned for future updates, and suggestions welcome :) [1]…

    2022 · modernhn.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3HN

    2014 · hilapeleg.io · its alternatives →

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    A protip by sergiotapia about css, html, and hackernews.

    2012 · coderwall.com · its alternatives →

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    I've been working on and off on a Chrome Extension for Hacker News, the extension focusses on improved usability rather than design. I can almost guarantee that after a day you won't want to go back to regular Hacker News. Give it a try, features include: - Improved readability - Quick inline replies from comments page - Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames - Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user - Endless scrolling - Collapsible comment threads - Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer Forks, improvements and comments…

    2012 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hey HN! I'm excited to share a tool I've been working on - a native Hacker News reader built with Rust and egui. Here's a screenshot: https://github.com/haojiang99/hacker_news_reader/blob/main/s.... As a daily HN reader, I've always struggled with keeping track of interesting posts I want to read later. Browser tabs pile up, bookmarks get forgotten, and I lose track of what I've already read. I needed a way to: 1. Browse HN efficiently (across all sections - hot, new, show, ask, jobs, best) 2. Quickly mark posts as "todo" for later reading 3. Mark posts as…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7RA

    A Hacker News client with a clean, mobile friendly UI. Features : - bookmark stories. follow discussions / read them later at your convenience. - quickly search for articles using keywords. No more scrolling through the website. - easily managable nested comments. I love the current Hacker News experience and I don't believe my client is in any way a substitute to the original website. Built it over a few days for fun and found myself coming back to it once in a while for some of the features. Wanted to share this with the community. Let me know what you folks think :)

    2022 · read-hn.herokuapp.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8MH

    2021 · hacker-news-dj.netlify.app · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    This userscript adds archive URLs to the metadata section of HN submissions without breaking the immersion. Here are 2 screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/PdUu6oG GreasyFork: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/452024-hacker-news-anti-pa... Source code: https://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall Now let me overexplain. -Why?- I never liked paywalled articles. I understand where they come from, but I don't like where we cross our paths. This is why I don't use major news aggregators anymore. Instead, I spend my…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Browser extension that fixes Hacker News' block formatting - corollari/fixedHackerNews

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    I forked pajecawav's better-hn repo, which turned out to be an excellent foundation to build on. While the original implementation was clean and functional, it didn't quite capture the essence of Hackernews. More importantly, it was missing some features I considered essential for a truly viable alternative. After tinkering with it for a while, I think I've nailed it—at least for my own use case. If it works well for me, chances are others might find it useful too. So I figured, why not share it? Pretty straightforward: no ads, no tracking, no monetization schemes and no intention to do so.…

    2025 · hakkernieuws.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    A Hacker News Reader in Vanilla JavaScript. Contribute to k2052/vanilla-hn development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Remove HackerNews threads by regex (for use with https://www.tampermonkey.net/) - removeHackerNewsThreadsByRegex.js

    2023 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →

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  16. 16

    This is a userscript that you can use with Tampermonkey, or paste it to JS console. I generated it with o1-preview, simply by pasting the HTML source of a HN page to the prompt and asking it to make a comment updating script. And it worked flawlessly — great job, OpenAI! I'm impressed. What a time to be alive! The prompt: https://chatgpt.com/share/66eb36c5-a55c-8005-9ee1-d42770297d... The script fetches new comments every 10 seconds and inserts them to a proper place in the DOM, highlighting them with a nice color. With this script, HN feels like a realtime chat in busy…

    2024 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17HN
  18. 18

    You may have seen this earlier with it's initial release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42056334 Now new features: Instant search/filter: Press / or use the command palette to filter stories as you type Command Palette: Press Ctrl+K to access all commands, including search, section switching, and more Options menu for each story (summarize, open, close) Section switching: Top, Ask, Show, Jobs Easy install & run with Cargo Feedback, comments, feature requests welcome.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19CF
  20. 20AP
  21. 21

    This isn't your fancy new javascript gizmo, but funny guy with a funny story to promote his toddler app. I'm sure you'll agree. Humor me. 1st let me tell you how I came upon hacker news, and why I read it everyday.<p>I'm not a programmer, and only half-decent designer. I'm much more of a 'project manager' type of person. I wrote a blog post 2 years ago on how to do a fancy trick with css3 with box shadows. It was clever, and has been expanded and implemented all over the web. One day (while sitting in church) my phone kept buzzing every couple of seconds with comments on that blog…

    2012 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →

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  23. 23RH
  24. 24EH

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →