Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of extensions to satisfy this use-case. The only question is: how can I trust one?

Not really. With user stylesheet (Custom.css), it was a local file you could edit with your favorite editor, and changes were live when you saved the file. I tried multiple extensions, and for all of them you need to paste your CSS in a box, click on a button to save it and reload the page to see any effects, which is quite painful compared to just typing :w<cr> in Vim.

You can continue to use vim, if you can paste from a file directly in a terminal. Mac OS X comes with pbcopy and Linux has xclip and xsel.

I'm thinking that the point is that this:

  Editor <=> File

is simpler than:

  Editor <=> Copy/Paste Text Box/Save Button <=> File

It's a more cumbersome feedback loop while making changes.

Take a look at Control Freak: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/control-freak/jgnc...

It's well-maintained and allows a user to inject custom CSS or JS on any URL, domain or all sites for their own tweaks and purposes. Maintaining these overrides just one click away offers a much better experience than hunting down this Custom.css buried within the filesystem.

You can look at the source code of any extension, doesn't have to be released under OSI-compliant license. <Chrome Profile Folder>/Extensions/<extension code>.

Get the Chrome profile folder for your platform from: http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/user-data-directory (note, may not be "Default" if you use a created user profile.)

Get the extension number from chrome://extensions/

One thing that needs to be taken care of is updates-gone-rogue (a la HoverZoom, for example.)

I'd say ... write yours. The one which satisfies your needs and your needs only.

There are dozens of extensions which change the new tab page - I didn't like any of them, so I hacked a quick one myself - it took me 2h? 1.5h? It was fast and I didn't need any complicated features - just a CSS-styled table with fixed list of links and a clock.

As others have mentioned, write your own.

Here are some templates: https://github.com/bsilvereagle/Extensions

It's pretty straight foward in my opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com