I don’t like to have to scroll my screen horizontally to read the comment. (I notice there’s a lot of perfectly good unused white space on the left side; comments would probably fit horizontally if you pushed everything to the left!)
Sometimes when you mouse over the side-comment icon, it tries to scroll the page to make the comment readable. This is very surprising and makes me lose my place.
Hovering over the icon makes the comment appear briefly. If I then want to scroll in order to read the comment, there seems to be no way to ‘stay hovered’—I have to click and toggle it, to make the comment stick around so I can actually read it. (This plus being forced to scroll the screen makes the hover feature kind of useless.)
Overall, feeling optimistic though, and will probably use this.
I don’t like to have to scroll my screen horizontally to read the comment. (I notice there’s a lot of perfectly good unused white space on the left side; comments would probably fit horizontally if you pushed everything to the left!)
Yeah, this is pretty annoying. We spent a decent amount of time trying to make it so that the whole page shifts to the left when you open a comment, but it ended up feeling too janky. We might still make it work later on.
The current layout is optimized for 1440px wide screen size, which is the most common width that people use the site with, but we can probably make it work for people who are more zoomed in or have smaller screens after a bit more work.
Sometimes when you mouse over the side-comment icon, it tries to scroll the page to make the comment readable. This is very surprising and makes me lose my place.
Hmm, this seems likely a bug. What browser and OS are you using?
Hovering over the icon makes the comment appear briefly. If I then want to scroll in order to read the comment, there seems to be no way to ‘stay hovered’—I have to click and toggle it, to make the comment stick around so I can actually read it. (This plus being forced to scroll the screen makes the hover feature kind of useless.)
The way I’ve found it most comfortable to engage with the side comments was to hover, read the first few lines, author and karma, then click to pin the comment open and then read the rest. This… is of course harder if you are on a smaller screen and can’t even get that basic information without scrolling first. As a bandaid (though this isn’t great), the hover-area over the comment icon actually extends horizontally all the way to the right of the screen, so you should be able to start hovering, then scroll to the right, and then decide to click (though if you decide to not click and hover away, your scroll position is janked in a disorienting way, which is also pretty annoying, IMO).
I think overall we probably should find some way to make the post move further to the left. The big problem with this (which you can’t see on this post) is the Table of Contents which actually takes up most of the available space on the left when it is present, and making both the side comments appear and the ToC appear is actually pretty hard and we don’t have a ton of extra space to work with.
Excited about this!
Points of feedback:
I don’t like to have to scroll my screen horizontally to read the comment. (I notice there’s a lot of perfectly good unused white space on the left side; comments would probably fit horizontally if you pushed everything to the left!)
Sometimes when you mouse over the side-comment icon, it tries to scroll the page to make the comment readable. This is very surprising and makes me lose my place.
Hovering over the icon makes the comment appear briefly. If I then want to scroll in order to read the comment, there seems to be no way to ‘stay hovered’—I have to click and toggle it, to make the comment stick around so I can actually read it. (This plus being forced to scroll the screen makes the hover feature kind of useless.)
Overall, feeling optimistic though, and will probably use this.
Yeah, this is pretty annoying. We spent a decent amount of time trying to make it so that the whole page shifts to the left when you open a comment, but it ended up feeling too janky. We might still make it work later on.
The current layout is optimized for 1440px wide screen size, which is the most common width that people use the site with, but we can probably make it work for people who are more zoomed in or have smaller screens after a bit more work.
Hmm, this seems likely a bug. What browser and OS are you using?
The way I’ve found it most comfortable to engage with the side comments was to hover, read the first few lines, author and karma, then click to pin the comment open and then read the rest. This… is of course harder if you are on a smaller screen and can’t even get that basic information without scrolling first. As a bandaid (though this isn’t great), the hover-area over the comment icon actually extends horizontally all the way to the right of the screen, so you should be able to start hovering, then scroll to the right, and then decide to click (though if you decide to not click and hover away, your scroll position is janked in a disorienting way, which is also pretty annoying, IMO).
I think overall we probably should find some way to make the post move further to the left. The big problem with this (which you can’t see on this post) is the Table of Contents which actually takes up most of the available space on the left when it is present, and making both the side comments appear and the ToC appear is actually pretty hard and we don’t have a ton of extra space to work with.