Ask HN: (Solved!) Using CSS to make HN comments only 8 to 10 words wide?

[bloopernova]

I was idly wondering if anyone had applied a custom style to Hacker News that forced comments to be 8 to 10 words wide?

Something like this:

    Comment by Blah:
    The best is to use a template literal.
    
        Reply by Foo:
        I disagree, you should use str.replace and ignore
        template literals.
    
            Reply by Blah:
            Respectfully, you are an idiot. Ignoring template literals
            for a horrible regex has no place in JavaScript.
    
        Reply by wattle:
        I agree, and here's a tangent that doesn't have
        much to do with the topic.

The optimum width of a paragraph is 50 to 80 characters with some disagreement on the max width. Which is about 8 to 10 words, or 30 to 50 em according to this question on stackoverflow: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/108801/what-is-the-best-number-of-paragraph-width-for-readability

Is it possible to style HN like that?

[graderjs]

Combine these two google searches:

- "ch width css", e.g: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/css-unit-guide/#:~:text=Th....

- "average length of English word", e.g: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-word-length-in-t....

So:

- 8 to 10 words, call it 9

- average word length: call it 5

- 5 * 9 = 45 word characters

- 9 words that's 8 space characters

- 45 + 8 that's 53 monospace characters

- in monospace all characters should have 1ch width (width of 0-character), so

- css as follows:

  :root, * {
    font-family: monospace !important;
  }

  .whatever-comment-class-is, p {
    max-width: 53ch;
    word-break: break-all;
    overflow: hidden;
  }

[bloopernova → graderjs]

Thank you! I used ublock origin to add this which seems to work well for my tastes:

    news.ycombinator.com##.comment:style(max-width: 60ch !important; overflow: hidden !important;)

EDIT: I felt that the comment header needed to be increased in visibility so I added this:

    news.ycombinator.com##.comhead:style(background: #e6e6df; font-weight: italic; color: #686868 !important;)
    news.ycombinator.com##.hnuser:style(background: #e6e6df; font-style: italic; color: #575757 !important;)

)

Note: ublock origin needs to be enabled for these rules to take effect.

[theseobosscom]

Install User CSS extension if you are using Chrome or Brave browser. Use the following code:

.comment { max-width: 65ch; }

[bloopernova]

I've been told that the comment text in my example is confusing to non-English speakers. I'll edit it and keep that in mind in the future.

[detaro]

sure, just set a max-width on the comments, like it already does for small screens.