A couple of weeks ago, @shazbot made this post about a project that they were working on. Since then, @shazbot, @ori, @minnieo and I have been hard at work, and we are excited to finally announce the official release of kbin Enhancement Suite (KES)!
kbin has seen an explosion of user-made add-ons, but keeping track of them in one place, letting them share settings with one another, and toggling them on and off can be a challenge. KES is an expandable add-on manager that aims to rectify this by providing a unified interface and framework for script makers to collaborate, and letting you use them all in one place.
KES brings together userscripts from the community, with a built-in settings menu that lets you tailor your experience to your liking. It also offers a flexible framework that empowers script authors to effortlessly integrate scripts into KES and set up custom input fields with no additional code.
KES gives you a single window onto a collection of enhancements that is growing by the day. And those features can be added to by you!
What the feed looks like with everything enabled
The comments with everything turned on
Features
We’ve focused on making customizing your kbin experience as easy as possible, whether you are on mobile or desktop. After we sort out the bug reports from this release, we plan on adding many more features! Here’s what we have so far:
- Collapsible comments with nesting (by @artillect)
- Use slash commands to add emoticons in text areas (by @minnieo)
- Add syntax highlighting (with customizable themes) to code blocks (by @ori)
- Show instance names next to non-local users and communities (by @artillect)
- Add a link to message users on your instance next to their usernames (by @shazbot)
- Hide upvote/downvote buttons and reputation (by @artillect)
- Show more detailed timestamps on threads and comments (by @shazbot)
- Hide thumbnails on threads (by @shazbot)
- Add link to subscribed magazines to the navbar (by @shazbot)
- Replace or hide the kbin logo in the navbar (by @shazbot)
- Add “OP” label next to thread author’s username in comments (by @shazbot)
- Convert navigation links on profile pages into a dropdown (by @shazbot)
Each of these can be toggled in the settings menu, and some of them have additional configuration options, such as setting custom labels, colors, etc.
New features are added on a rolling basis and the menu pages will update on the fly to reflect this new content.
Installation
Click here to install KES, and follow your userscript manager’s prompt to complete the installation.
If you don’t have a userscript management extension, you can install one of these, and then install KES using the link above:
- TamperMonkey (desktop, or Firefox on Android)
- Userscripts (iOS 15+)
Once KES is successfully installed, access the settings menu by clicking on the wrench icon located at the top-right corner next to your username. From there, you can enable the features you like, and customize your browsing experience.
More information
For bug reports and feature requests, visit our GitHub repository’s issues page. If you have any questions or need assistance, don’t hesitate to ask here or make a post on /m/enhancement!
Developers
If you are a userscript author, we’d love it if you could try porting your userscripts into KES, or try writing completely new ones for it! @shazbot has made it easy to integrate your scripts: you just need to add your script’s information to manifest.json, make a few small modifications to your script, add it all to the GitHub repository, and you’re good to go!
KES benefits:
- Turnkey integration: a simple, declarative framework for dynamically adding features to the UI without touching the underlying code
- Sharing of user-defined settings through script namespaces: access your script settings, and those from other scripts, through a well-defined object
- Automatically responds to infinite scroll and page reload events
- Attribution of script authors
- Easily toggle scripts on/off
Explore KES’s documentation here to get started. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out here, on /m/enhancement, or at our GitHub repository.
Fantastic project and fantastic work.
For what it's worth I'd love to see the following userscripts ported to KES:
I'm still running these three scripts in addition to KES, but if they were ported to KES it would make managing them easier (via a common interface for options) and reduce the potential for conflicts.
For example, running Kbin Subscriptions Panel a well as KES produces this visual glitch in the navbar, where the icons get mixed up:
notifications panel i'd love to see especially, that has been so useful! i hope @blobcat considers inserting their script (´꒳`)
Would love to! I'm trying to figure out how, I've never used git much and I'm still really new to doing anything JS related (ㅠ﹏ㅠ)
Kbin Notification Panel for sure, it's SO much better than the vanilla notifications.
I'd like to see @raltsm4k 's Floating Subs List make the cut instead of that Subscription Panel though. Its the same functionally, just more aesthetically pleasing.
Why not both? ((eyebrows))
Both is good!
The author of the notification panel has submitted their script for inclusion and it is ready to be integrated after the next version bump.
Phenomenal news!
i also prefer this, i even made a customizable userstyle for it
Thanks, this is noted, and it seems eminently doable. Is there a particular add-on that is enabled that causes this glitch?
Thanks @shazbot !
Not that I've been able to identify after toggling various options KES on and off.
The visual glitch also appears if I disable the Notifications Panel and Better Page Navigation scripts, so it seems to be something in the interaction between KES and Subscriptions Panel.
If it makes a difference, I use Firefox on Windows with Tampermonkey.
Thanks, I've made a stub for it here if you wish to track its progress.
@shazbot Glitch was fixed in the latest KES update, thanks!