very glad the dev version has finally been released, as i was missing list view desperately. however, now that i’m ensconced in its loving arms once again, i’m noticing one major missing piece of the experience: a way to navigate to the next story without expanding it, thereby allowing me to skip to the stories i’m more interested in first.
in google reader, the hotkeys were:
j: skip to next story, expand it, mark it as read
n: skip to next story
return: expand/collapse story (mark read upon expansion, if unread)
m: toggle read/unread state, regardless of expansion state
what this means is that if i want to read every 10th story, i just hit n 10 times, then return to expand the story i want. this functionality doesn’t seem to exist in newsblur. if i want to use hotkeys to navigate to a specific story without reading the intervening content, i must hit j (or n, or the down arrow), then hit u to mark the story unread again. so it’s double the number of keystrokes.
i have no recourse whatsoever to prevent a story from expanding.
i don’t see why there are 3 hotkeys for (essentially) the same action; might i suggest repurposing one of these for this valuable function? i’d prefer the n key, simply because it establishes parity with google reader. but the down arrow would work as well, i just need to retrain my muscle memory. the p or up arrow keys would be the converses.
I see what you’re asking for, but it’s a bit time consuming and I don’t know if there are enough other people who want this. Chime in, fellow hotkey wanters.
i can think of several use cases for not wanting to expand a story’s content. say, a spoiler-laden recap of a TV episode you haven’t watched yet, or a photography blog that includes nudes, viewed in a strict work environment. i’m guessing a lot of other reader expats will want this functionality as well, i just hope they actually see this thread, lest we encounter a bunch of false negatives
I want this as well or something similar.
A lot of times, I read feeds by just scanning titles and only opening stuff that I want to read. This would speed up the interface for me. Basically being able to go to each item and just mark it as read/unread.
Another plus is when you’re reading feeds with potentially NSFW material in it.
I don’t want to have that story open up.
This is definitely how I use Google Reader, and how I want to use NewsBlur.
My mode with news is to subscribe to a bunch of things that might be interesting, and then to skim titles for articles that are actually valuable to me. Opening articles I don’t want to read now is problematic for me in a few ways:
the article takes up a lot of space when really what I want to see is more titles
it marks things as read when I really haven’t read them yet
it shows a shiny distraction, and my main goal with RSS vs browsing sites directly is to avoid needless distractions
Right now I solve this by using the mouse wheel and pointer to scroll and open articles, and the recently-added X key to close. It’d be great to make this an all-keyboard activity.
To answer Samuel’s question on this GitHub issue (defunct), I don’t think selecting a non-expanded story should mark the story as read. It should just give focus to the story, so that enter (or some other appropriate key binding, ‘x’ would be fine with me) expands it. Any previously expanded story should collapse of course.
Google Reader and Digg Reader implement this feature; probably other newsreaders too. I’m living with using the mouse to navigate and expand/collapse items in Newsblur for now, but it’s less convenient than keyboard navigation.
yes. precisely that. the implementation of the x key for expanding/collapsing happened after i filed this sug, and it brings us SO CLOSE! just one more piece to the puzzle left!
obviously, the X key already resolves the issue raised in that link, and i use it liberally. but i’m interested in the later part of the discussion, specifically the points toupeira raises in his last 2 comments.
i like newsblur enough to have renewed my pro subscription, and it has evolved dramatically over the course of the last year, for which i am extremely grateful. but this feature is very, very useful, and is still a noticeable regression for former greader users.
This is still a hefty chunk of work to add in focus ability for stories. It would also split the interaction with story titles in two: auto-expanding and not. Right now it’s all auto-expanding. But I’d have to write a whole mode around not auto-expanding. Tricky stuff.
i’m under no illusion that it’s an easy task, and i totally understand if there’s still a bunch of low-hanging fruit you want to knock out first. but it’s really valuable for there to be a meaningful distinction between the expansion and focus actions. as it stands, there’s no way (using only the keyboard) to get to a story you want without expanding every story along the way; there are many reasons to want to keep the list collapsed while you navigate.
so, are you saying that this idea’s difficulty means you aren’t going to implement it? or just that we should sit tight for a while?
I’ve got a number of other projects I’m working on first. The organizer, discovery, and offline in android. I might get around to this when all of that ships.
Samuel, you asked fellow “hotkey wanters” to chime in. This is me chiming in.
I too would love the Google Reader behavior. It allowed for way faster skimming than any of the current modes. The current modes have changing layouts when switching to the next item due to the fact that content is displayed. That is very distracting when trying to skim a long list of items very fast. The larger font also doesn’t make it easy to parse the full title without moving the eyes.
