I just realized I never mentioned in yesterday's announcement that I improved the way searching in comments works earlier this week and thought I should mention it.

tl;dr: There's a search bar next to the comment sort options, typing in there will highlight all the comments that contain your search text, and a second floating nav bar shows up which lets you click next/previous buttons to scroll between search matches.

If you're curious: some technical background. Comments (and basically any other list in Alexandrite) are rendered using a "virtual list" or "virtualized rendering", this is pretty complicated but really common optimization used on sites/apps that let you scroll infinitely as it lets you show a huge list of stuff without the site getting really laggy. It does this by only actually rendering as many comments (or posts etc) as can fit on screen, and skipping the rest, adjusting what's shown to wherever you scroll. So if you're on a post with 1000 comments and you've scrolled down quite a ways, instead of all 1000 comments being on the page maybe only comments 220-230 are there. To an end user you should usually never notice this, but if you scroll really fast, or hit the "scroll to top" button you might sometimes notice the page is blank before a post or comment pops in to fill the empty space a moment later.

The only issue with that, is if not all of the comments are actually on the page you can't really Ctrl+f to search for something in comments, as only a few of the comments are on the page at once. So I needed an in-site way to search through comments, which is where this came in!

EDIT: This is now released on the main site, enjoy!

Original post:

I've got some big stuff I'm planning on releasing either later tonight or tomorrow, and I wanted some testers if anyone's willing! ~~The link is at the end of the post.~~

The instance you're browsing is now in the page url, so if you're logged in on lemmy.world, you'll be (once released) on https://alexandrite.app/lemmy.world/.... Now you can share links directly to Alexandrite to friends and they can view it without needing to set a home instance anymore.

But the real cool feature is a new account switcher! This lets you switch between all of your accounts on the instance you're browsing! You can also set a default account to use for that instance. Now you could be logged in on multiple accounts across multiple instances just in different browser tabs if you wanted.

Two clicks to switch which instance you're using (based on what accounts you have)

If you have accounts on more than one instance you can pick which instance you see by default when you go to https://alexandrite.app with no instance in the url, or chose to login on any of the accounts you've signed in as.

You'll need to login again because it's a new url, but I wrote some code to migrate to the new way I'm handling accounts so you won't be logged out when this is all released.

Please let me know if you find any bugs!

I just added a new feature I think is neat. When one part of a comment thread ends and the next comment is a reply to an earlier comment now there is an up arrow icon you can hover over to see a bit of the parent comment. Now it should be much easier to understand what people are talking about without having to collapse all the comments along the way.

Little easier to understand with a picture:

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1752539

I've added a bunch of new features to Alexandrite (a third party Lemmy alternate web UI for desktop)!

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

Lemmy Settings

You can now change most of Lemmy's settings (just not language/avatar/banner/2FA/password).

Mod tools

A lot of mod tools were added. You can view reports and be able to do most things except appoint/removing mods and viewing the mod log.

Scroll between top level comments buttons

Floating at the bottom of the page when viewing a post you will now see a little navigation bar that lets you scroll between comments (and a similar one on the post list that lets you scroll to the top of the page).

Better markdown editor

The text editor used when making posts/comments has been upgraded! Now you can find buttons for bold/italic etc, most of the things you can do on the official website.

If you have any issues let me know, or create an issue on Github.

I'm planning on making Alexandrite self-hostable and I'm wondering what stuff I should add or make customizable for instance admins.

With some help from @lemmy@endlesstalk.org's customizations on their instance I was thinking of doing:

• Support account creation
• Make a Dockerfile
• (optionally) Allow you to remove the "Instance" input on the login page so you can only login to a specific instance (and let you browse posts without logging in or picking an instance first)
• (optionally) Let you disable some of the onboarding stuff/version warning on the login page

Anything else you think I should add?

Yo! I've been working on a few new things.

First of all, I added support for some of Lemmy's settings. You can now change most things (except for languages, avatar/banner images, 2FA).

I also added a new markdown editor I built this morning. It's pretty similar to the one on the official UI, but at least in my little experimenting it feels a bit less buggy. Nonetheless I wouldn't be surprised if there are some issues so please let me know if you run into any problems! It doesn't yet have hotkeys (like ctrl+b for bold, etc), I plan to add those later.

I wanted to add image uploading, but unless I want to proxy all image uploads like Voyager does I'm going to have to wait for a solution to lemmy#3567.

Edit: I added hotkeys for bold and italics, whatever the normal one for your OS is.

I'm the dev of Alexandrite, a desktop-first alternative Lemmy web UI. If you missed it, here's my announcement.

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

I've been working on a load of stuff lately and I wanted to post an update on all the things I've added since the first announcement.

There's a new feed layout! Now when scrolling on a feed of posts, in addition to the old overlay view, you can now view a post side-by-side with the post list, which makes it easier to casually look through posts. By default it will pick the best layout for your screen size, but you can force it to use either the column or the overlay layout in the settings.

I've added some basic theming! All of the purple colors in text/borders/backgrounds you see on Alexandrite are based on the same hue, now you can completely change the look of the site with a slider in the settings. Here are some examples:

You can now block/unblock communities, as well as block communities directly from post lists!

You can now choose if NSFW thumbnails are either: hidden (unless you click it), blurred, or always shown.

Markdown formatting is much better. Most things are supported now, and Alexandrite will automatically detect links to users/communities/posts and change their URLs to their page on Alexandrite, making it easier to browse.

All of the Lemmy API calls are now client side, previously it would be proxied through Alexandrite's server, but that has been removed, so now nothing is sent to Alexandrite's servers. This should make it easier to self host, but I haven't yet explored that.

That's all the big important things. Lots of bug fixing behind the scenes too. Hope you like it!