Show HN: I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript
HN is great for the links people share, but a big part of the value I get comes from reading the discussion around them. I realized I was always opening the article in one tab and the comments in another, constantly switching back and forth. I figured there was probably a simpler way, so I threw together this userscript to merge the two. 1. Clicking a link from Hacker News opens the article with a side panel containing the discussion. It doesn't require your credentials, is resizable, and is easy to tweak if you want to customize it. 2. If you land on an article that has previously been shared on HN, the script finds the existing discussion and adds a button in the top-right to open the panel. Feedback welcome.
Discussion Highlights (19 comments)
ahachete
I feel ya. I'm always middle clicking twice, story and comments. This shouldn't be a script (no offense, great job!). It should be built into the browsers!
djfdat
This is great and is also something that I've always had an issue with. What I do now is open the HN comments, and then when I'm ready to look at the link + comments, right-click on the title and Open in Split View.
hugopuybareau
Nice idea ! How do you handle duplicates ?
pluc
Firefox has a new Split View that's useful for this, but you still have to left click and select open in split view (M) then click the link. You also used to be able on some browsers to craft a link that was href="tab1.html|tab2.html", no idea if that's still a thing or if it was limited to "home page" setting.
perpil
This is slick. 2 things. 1. If you name your script with the extension .user.js it is easier to click on to automatically install at least with tampermonkey. 2. When I went to this link from the main page, on mobile I had to scroll to the right to see the (-) to minimize because the sidebar was too large: https://elizabethtai.com/2026/06/10/substack-writers-you-nee... It may make some sense to start minimized so I can read the article first, but I can easily modify the script to do that.
blopp99
Thought I was the only one hahaha
Topology1
Phew, thought I was the only one doing that. I thought I was missing some core site feature lol.
joshdavham
I think the amount of upvotes you’re getting here suggests that it might be worth building a proper browser extension for this! Would you be interested in making one?
prtmnth
Haha, this is so cool and can't believe I didn't think about it. I've been opening 2 tabs per HN link on my phone since forever!
f3408fh
Now make a user script that blocks posts titled "I was tired of X, so I...".
james2doyle
Nice. I’ve been using the new split tabs in Chrome. Works perfectly. I believe Firefox had this first?
txhwind
I also wrote a Monkey script to save clicks when reading papers: just embed PDF webview into the Arxiv abstract page. https://github.com/OneMoreSecond/FileSave/blob/master/arxiv_... It seems the software productivity has exploded in the agent era. However, do we treat every point of daily experience seriously enough? Do we recognize such pains actively and try to eliminate them (often easy), or just tolerate infinitely?
zouhair
hehe, I opened chatgpt and the little button blocks the three dots
franciscop
I made something slightly similar ~10 years ago where you could embed HN comments in your own site. It was the opposite end of consumer though, for webdevs to embed it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12898366 Note: I took it down when it seemed it could degrade HN quality if people used it as normal comments, but yours is great since it's the opposite target/usage
kwar13
I made an extension that opens both tabs for you and thus far has a whopping 6 users! https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-saved-y...
locusofself
Is it lame that (especially for super long discussions), I often open a gemini tab and summarize the comments? I like reading HN comment threads, but I often only have a few minutes and just want to get the gist of the reactions from the community for some topic.
pseudosavant
This is pretty cool! It had never crossed my mind that everyone else is doing the same two tab thing that I'm doing.
Natalia724
The mobile default seems important here: opening the panel collapsed, then preserving its size per site, could keep the first article read predictable while retaining quick access to the discussion.
kccqzy
Feature 2 is really useful. When I land on a technical article I know chances are there will be a nice HN discussion, that may sometimes even refute the main point of the article. Feature 1 is IMO less useful. It just suggests that people are bad at window management. We didn't like overlapping windows and finding them, so we created tabs inside windows. Then we wanted to see two things at the same time, so we created split views inside tabs (Chrome and Firefox both had this). With a good window manager neither would be necessary. Sadly the community prefers to solve this at the application level rather than the desktop level; I'm currently using Forge ( https://github.com/forge-ext/forge ) but sadly it's becoming unmaintained.