/kbin meta @kbin.social artillect @kbin.social 1 yr. ago

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!

The KES settings menu

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.

144

144 comments

I appreciate the effort, but am curious as to why this is needed in an open source project. I would much prefer these types of things be part of the default experience instead of a third party solution. Is this just my own ignorance showing? Is there a reason to handle this with a third party tool instead of a pull request in the kbin code?

RES was needed because reddit went closed source and didn't prioritize the things people wanted.

Please don't take my comment as being ungrateful for the great work you've done. It's just an idle question that will probably serve only to demonstrate how little I know. haha
Very cool. I hope that some of these nice features will eventually be upstreamed/ported to vanilla Kbin, but it's great to already have a strong community of add-ons. Keep up the great work!
Fantastic project and fantastic work.

For what it's worth I'd love to see the following userscripts ported to KES:

Better Navigation Page - makes the page number at the bottom more readable

Kbin Notifications Panel - adds a notification panel to the navigation bar

Kbin Subscriptions Panel - adds a collapsible, filterable side panel with a list of all magazine subscriptions (KES has an "Add subs to navbar" option, but the subscriptions panel is a more sophisticated and user-friendly alternative)

I'm still running these three scripts in addition to KES, but if they were ported to KES it would make managing them easier (via a common interface for options) and reduce the potential for conflicts.

For example, running Kbin Subscriptions Panel a well as KES produces this visual glitch in the navbar, where the icons get mixed up:
Collapsing comments is really smooth and the tap anywhere to collapse is something I didn't knew I needed. Good job, thank you!
I would have called it Kbin Enhancement Kit (KEK)
This is pretty nice even at such an early stage in development. Very much appreciated, thank you.
Seems to work pretty well on mobile Firefox with Tampermonkey. Haven't had a chance to fully explore yet, but looks really good so far! Good job!
This is really nice, just installed it and so many little nitpicks I had are completely gone.

Are there any plans to add a feature to make it move the comment box to right under the original post instead of at the bottom of the comments? That's really my only gripe about kbin that bugs me quite a bit.
woot woot, nice to finally see an announcement post on this ♡
Lovely work! Thanks a lot!
Hell yes stoked to try this
Seems to throw some errors with Violentmonkey on Firefox. Haven't looked too deep into it yet though.
Love the concept, though it looks like Firefox ViolentMonkey comment collapsing doesn't work quite right. The comments end up stacked on top of each other like cards.
its really nice, thank you!
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?
Greasemonkey on Firefox on MacOS, seems to not really work? The CSS updated slightly but there's not gear icon in the top right or anything.
Hm. Been using kbin enhancement script + kbin usability pack so far but I'll check it out.

Edit: Nevermind, doesn't seem to work for me at all. I don't even get the settings button.
I know this is a few days old, but I'm just now seeing this, and wanted to thank you for collapsible comments. This one little addition makes things so much cleaner now!

Do you know if hiding individual threads from the feed is something that can be added to this, as well? Or does that require an update with Kbin, itself?
I love it! I have one question though, wouldn't it be better to separate KES version from all of the userscript/settings versions? Updating from 1.1.4 to 1.1.6 only moved the version up in userscript info, since all the userscripts are updated separately anyway. Updating KES would make sense only if something in kes.user.js is changed, right now users just get KES update prompts that do nothing.
Nice! Thanks for making and sharing. Just curious. Why not contribute to Kbin? I bet some of those customizations would be appreciated as cor Kbin.

You've viewed 144 comments.