I’m currently facing a little annoyance when browsing feeds in the feed view. This comes from two facts:
when navigating via keyboard shortcuts, the feed view does not always scroll in such a way that the currently selected story (as seen in the story titles pane) is at the top (which is not a problem by itself)
I sometimes have new stories, that are not “in order” (i.e. arrive at the top) but get sorted in between already read stories (probably because of their dates)
This by itself isn’t a problem. What I would like to suggest though, is a better highlighting of the currently selected story in the feed view. When navigating solely by keyboard, one has no indication, which story is currently selected in the top view and one frequently opens the wrong story (via keyboard o) or has to look the selection up in the titles pane.
Some slight tint, marker symbol or something to that end would greatly improve the situation without much effort.
Maybe this could be an optional thing or customized in some other way (optional would always be great)? Alternatively the feed view could ensure that it always scrolls the currently selected story to the top, when using the keyboard shortcuts. Just encountered the same thing again, pressed “n” for the next story and have about four stories on screen and no indication that the currently selected one is the second one from the bottom in this case (this mostly seems to happen when the stories cannot be reloaded quickly enough and the highlighted story is one of the last ones currently in the list, even if only for a short period of time)
+1. i’m all for good design, if you think you can do better than other readers - and you probably can! - but there should be something to indicate the active story. i use full screen mode, so at the bottom of my feed, when the active story is one of the ones below the indicator arrow, and i want to e.g. open it by pressing ‘o’, i can’t tell if i’m currently on the right one.
On a side note: this hasn’t got to be a large highlight, tinting of the currently selected story or something to that effect. For example currently there is a small circle in front of the story title for unread stories and a triangle appears when the mouse hovers over that story. That place could for example feature another symbol (or a dark blue tint for the circle) for the currently selected story which would already be enough to visually discern the currently selected story from the other ones. When going through a lot of stories, it is enough to know, where to find the indicator.
(this mostly seems to happen when the stories cannot be reloaded quickly enough and the highlighted story is one of the last ones currently in the list, even if only for a short period of time)