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.

It's weird, for the past few weeks I've been trying to switch from reddit to lemmy but something wasn't quite there... I couldn't tell what but I tried all sorts of apps and even the old.reddit style lemmy. After finding this app I can finally say I feel 0 reason to go back to reddit, great work! Kinda dumb but I decided my first post had to be about it since this is the reason for me to be on lemmy now. Also, is it just me or does it adapt to ultrawide resolutions? I've never dreamed to have a better experience browsing on ultrawide but here we are!

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.

As others have mentioned - this is an incredible web client for Lemmy and my favourite among the current options. Just wondering if there are any plans to integrate a card view for posts? Would be great to have the option to toggle between card view and thumbnail/compact mode depending on user preference. Thanks!

I really like the UI and wanted to easily access it. Anyone is welcome to use it if they want, but will have to register for an account at endlesstalk.org, since that is the only account you can login with.

I don't know how best to provide one's hue ... I'm using the slider all the way to the left ... a dark burgundy red so that everything else pops! Works really nicely!!

Hope suggestions are appreciated here?!

Loving the columnar layout and the way I can have my feed on the left and just kinda work through it without losing my place or anything. And so the general idea behind this post is to lean into that dynamic as much as possible. In a way I'm thinking that taking inspiration from the mastodon or tweetdeck layouts might make sense.

Some more specific thoughts:

1. It'd be nice if the notifications view could leave the feed column intact so that one can go back and forth between viewing a post and reading/responding to replies
2. Posting to a community could similarly occupy only the space on the ~~left~~ right while leaving the feed column intact.

Perhaps taking this too far ... could there be multiple columns. Like 3? Feed - Post/comments - "Sidebar", where the sidebar can be the normal lemmy side bar, or, the notifications view, and maybe the post writing view too ... basically all the other stuff. And maybe it could optionally hidden or expanded, like the sidebar right now?

Otherwise ... loving Alexandrite and the columnar view!!

Edit I've deployed the new version that brings lemmy API calls to the client-side, let me know if you run into any issues!

Original post:

Hey everyone!

First, as you might have seen, lemmy.world, among others, experienced a hack. As part of their mitigation efforts they logged everyone out. I knew Alexandrite didn't yet handle expired sessions so I made a fix this morning. Now when you load Alexandrite it'll redirect you back to the login page if your session has expired.

Second I wanted to mention some of my ongoing work. I'm in the middle of a big rewrite! So far all of the interactions between Alexandrite and Lemmy (except loading images) happened on Alexandrite's server, but because of rate limits and hosting costs this is not as easy to scale, so I'm in the middle of rewriting it to move all of the Lemmy API usage to the client side. When this gets deployed hopefully in the next few days you'll have to log in again as the login token will be stored somewhere else. One downside of this is it bumps the minimum Lemmy version to 0.18.1, but most of the big servers should probably be updated by the time I release this, most already are. This effort should hopefully make it easier to self host Alexandrite, something I plan on exploring and documenting more later.

Besides having to log in again this should all be behind the scenes work, so you shouldn't otherwise notice anything different.

After all of that's done I had planned on working on either adding more of the missing features, or making some alternate post/feed layouts. I also plan on adding settings (both Lemmy and Alexandrite settings), the most flashy of which will be ability to change the hue of things on the website. Don't like all the purple? You'll be able to change that!

What can I try to troubleshoot this? I've tried clearing the cache.

It makes it easier to prioritize what I work on if I know someone's wanting a feature. What sort of stuff do you wish Alexandrite had? Especially talking about missing features from the main UI.

If you can, please provide some explanation for why you would like that feature and what problem it would solve for you (unless of course it's a feature that Lemmy has already but Alexandrite doesn't support yet). Knowing what problem you want solved helps me work with you to brainstorm ideas for the best solution (see the XY problem).