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Comment by curiousfab | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand about these "modern" apps is that users simply seem to accept that they waste megapixels of screen real estate for nothing. This has always put me off from using these, so still "stuck" with irssi + screen and (if no ssh) CGI:IRC.

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I was looking at the screenshot on the linked page, and I failed to see where you think the megapixels were wasted? The channel list? Or the alignment of username/message?

Yes, channel list, user list, lots of white space next to the usernames, for my taste there's also excessive spacing between the single message lines, the channel topic line could take up half of the space, and so on.

I know that many modern apps follow this pattern and it may have to do with making things responsive and work well across many different devices and platforms, but I simply cannot be happy with low information density.

YMMV. It's good that there are so many different clients to chose from. IRC still rocks.

At some point if you have too little spacing, everything becomes very crowded.

That being said, The Lounge supports themes, and it's trivial to reduce spacing to fit your needs. There's even a box in settings where you can put custom css directly in.

The channel list can be collapsed by clicking the icon to the left of the topic. The user list can be collapsed by clicking the icon in the top right corner. There is also an area in the settings to add your own CSS rules. Just wanted to point those things out because they probably aren't immediately visible from the linked page and the screenshot.

So you used irssi without both channel list and user list?

I mean, HexChat use roughly the same space (the username part is configurable), so this is hardly a problem of 'modern UI'. (XChat, which HexChat fork from, was initially released in 1999)

I use weechat without the user list and with the channel list taking up exactly 1 line of space. The default theme for TheLounge is certainly more. You can hide the side-bar with the channel list by hitting the hamburger button, and hide the user list by hitting the people-icon button.

That being said, I think the whitespace between the lines was the complaint (IIRC the default is a line size of 1.4 and 3px padding)

With a little CSS I eliminated the WS, and here's a screenshot with the two sidebars hidden:

https://imgur.com/ZRiDhJz.png

> So you used irssi without both channel list and user list?

Not the guy you asked, but isn't that the default? I've always done '/names' to see who was there and '/list' to see what channels were available.

You might like some of their other themes, like this one: https://www.npmjs.com/package/lounge-theme-mininapse

I personally find most "slack-ified" IRC clients to be much more legible and easy on the eyes than weechat/irssi although I do like the terminal clients for their keyboard nav and even deeper theme options.

But obviously the best part about The Lounge being browser-based and overall more modern is that I can easily use it from my phone, too. SSHing into an irssi session is far more tedious and annoying when I'm not sitting in front of my desktop.

I've heard good things about irccloud[1]. Costs money, but has good integration on phones (e.g. sends you notifications, keeps you connected even if you use ios and apps aren't allowed to run in the background).

1. https://www.irccloud.com/

If you look at the example represented by the screenshot, with a half-dozen people in a channel, these issues probably don't matter that much.

Using this on a channel with 200 people in the channel and 2-4 conversations taking place at once, and they matter a lot.

Why would it matter? Can't I just zoom out my browser window to fit more conversations on screen?

i spend many hours every day in an IRC channel with the "200 people, 2-4 conversations at one time" characteristics. i don't want huge blank pixel spaces between lines, because that just means i'm going t need to scroll more often to get context. i don't want to zoom the text, because then i can't read it as easily.

Got it, that makes sense. It reminds me of the email list interface in Gmail, and how even at the "compact" setting, there is still too much space.

I think with thelounge the problem can be solved with some custom CSS ( which thelounge supports adding ). But this is not a very user-friendly option.

Funny enough, just like at a previous online book company I worked at, the problem can also be solved by a greasemonkey script :p

You can simply remove the padding with:

/* remove padding for channel switcher */

#jump-to-container .channel-list-item[data-type=lobby] {

  padding: 0px;

}

in the custom stylesheet section of your thelounge installation.

Lounge is very conservative in screen space usage. You have your channels, content and users.

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