kbin Enhancement Suite: a community-curated script manager that lets you customize your kbin experience
kbin Enhancement Suite: a community-curated script manager that lets you customize your kbin experience
A couple of weeks ago, @shazbot made this post about a project that they were working on. Since then, @shazbot, @ori, @minnieo and I have been hard at work, and we are excited to finally announce the official release of kbin Enhancement Suite (KES)!
kbin has seen an explosion of user-made add-ons, but keeping track of them in one place, letting them share settings with one another, and toggling them on and off can be a challenge. KES is an expandable add-on manager that aims to rectify this by providing a unified interface and framework for script makers to collaborate, and letting you use them all in one place.
KES brings together userscripts from the community, with a built-in settings menu that lets you tailor your experience to your liking. It also offers a flexible framework that empowers script authors to effortlessly integrate scripts into KES and set up custom input fields with no additional code.
KES gives you a single window onto a collection of enhancements that is growing by the day. And those features can be added to by you!
What the feed looks like with everything enabled
The comments with everything turned on
Features
We’ve focused on making customizing your kbin experience as easy as possible, whether you are on mobile or desktop. After we sort out the bug reports from this release, we plan on adding many more features! Here’s what we have so far:
- Collapsible comments with nesting (by @artillect)
- Use slash commands to add emoticons in text areas (by @minnieo)
- Add syntax highlighting (with customizable themes) to code blocks (by @ori)
- Show instance names next to non-local users and communities (by @artillect)
- Add a link to message users on your instance next to their usernames (by @shazbot)
- Hide upvote/downvote buttons and reputation (by @artillect)
- Show more detailed timestamps on threads and comments (by @shazbot)
- Hide thumbnails on threads (by @shazbot)
- Add link to subscribed magazines to the navbar (by @shazbot)
- Replace or hide the kbin logo in the navbar (by @shazbot)
- Add “OP” label next to thread author’s username in comments (by @shazbot)
- Convert navigation links on profile pages into a dropdown (by @shazbot)
Each of these can be toggled in the settings menu, and some of them have additional configuration options, such as setting custom labels, colors, etc.
New features are added on a rolling basis and the menu pages will update on the fly to reflect this new content.
Installation
Click here to install KES, and follow your userscript manager’s prompt to complete the installation.
If you don’t have a userscript management extension, you can install one of these, and then install KES using the link above:
- TamperMonkey (desktop, or Firefox on Android)
- Userscripts (iOS 15+)
Once KES is successfully installed, access the settings menu by clicking on the wrench icon located at the top-right corner next to your username. From there, you can enable the features you like, and customize your browsing experience.
More information
For bug reports and feature requests, visit our GitHub repository’s issues page. If you have any questions or need assistance, don’t hesitate to ask here or make a post on /m/enhancement!
Developers
If you are a userscript author, we’d love it if you could try porting your userscripts into KES, or try writing completely new ones for it! @shazbot has made it easy to integrate your scripts: you just need to add your script’s information to manifest.json, make a few small modifications to your script, add it all to the GitHub repository, and you’re good to go!
KES benefits:
- Turnkey integration: a simple, declarative framework for dynamically adding features to the UI without touching the underlying code
- Sharing of user-defined settings through script namespaces: access your script settings, and those from other scripts, through a well-defined object
- Automatically responds to infinite scroll and page reload events
- Attribution of script authors
- Easily toggle scripts on/off
Explore KES’s documentation here to get started. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out here, on /m/enhancement, or at our GitHub repository.
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I've seen a couple prompts to update the script via wrench menu, but the changes don't seem clear at a glance. Is there a changelog somewhere we can view what has changed?
It's a valid concern, will be doing that going forward once the dust settles. I think it will be an external document rather than a widget inside the menu. You are just seeing custodial changes (hotfixes) to some of the bugs reported today. If the third number is incrementing, it is a hotfix.
Thanks @shazbot! That makes sense to keep it external; although I think a static link to an external doc would not be out of place next to the version number on the wrench menu.
I really appreciate what you guys are doing, these scripts make all the difference in experience on kbin.
Yes, agreed with a link for sure, I just meant that I don't want to have a fancy widget just for the purpose of displaying the full changelog inside the menu, I think that will be tedious to maintain.
Oh! yeah, that would just be unnecessary upkeep for sure.
This has been added in
1.2.0.