Show HN: Columnary, a better experience for reading long articles
chromewebstore.google.comIt bothered me that despite all the space on my laptop screen or desktop monitor, reading web articles felt like breathing through a straw. Horizontal space is poorly used and vertical space is in short supply, leaving only a few paragraphs on screen at once.
Columnary is a Chrome extension that makes full use of your screen real estate, whether it's a small screen laptop or a 5K monitor. It strips ads and formatting, and puts everything into columns in a horizontally scrolling format. This way, articles can fill 100% of your screen while keeping line lengths readable.
This transforms the way your brain processes articles. When you can see the whole thing at once, you can utilise your natural spatial processing ability to make sense of where you are.
Columnary also includes a bookmark feature so you can mark your place when stepping away from long articles, and various typography settings and a full screen mode, as well as keyboard shortcuts to help you scroll by column.
Source code is at https://github.com/kevinwuwon/columnary
Thanks. Unfortunately, scrolling (the article from left to right) with a mouse wheel doesn't work.
Good feedback, thanks! I'll see if I can fix that today.
For now, you can press the left and right arrow keys or shift-left and shift-right to jump by column.
OK, I have implemented this; expect to see it as version 1.0 tomorrow when it gets approved.
You'll be able to use the vertical scroll wheel to scroll horizontally.
nice