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sheodox @lemmy.world

Introducing Alexandrite for Lemmy, a desktop-first alternative web UI

Website, community, Github

I've been working on an alternative web UI for Lemmy for a couple weeks now and it's got enough features I wanted to share it. I love that somehow people have found it despite me never having posted online about it until now (until a couple days ago it was called sx-lemmy, sx being an abbreviation of my username) so you might have seen it in a list already.

Alexandrite is a (for the moment) desktop-first Lemmy interface, I primarily use Lemmy on my computer and I wanted a more convenient way to view posts and comments without juggling tabs or losing my place in the feed (with infinite scrolling). It's still very much in beta, and I have a lot of work to do still, but it's got most of the basic features.

You can view a post and comments in an overlay without losing where you scrolled to:

A non-exhaustive list of things you can do:

  • view home/community/user/communities feeds
  • post/comment
  • subscribe to communities
  • vote
  • save posts
  • search
  • inbox stuff

Noteworthy missing features:

  • reporting
  • blocking users/communities
  • mod tools
  • image uploading
  • automatic linkifying of urls/communities/users in comments/posts

For those who care, it's all Sveltekit which is a dream to work with. Alexandrite is the name of the kind of gem in my wife's wedding ring, it looks cool and changes color in the light.

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43 comments

  • I'm having trouble logging in. The app says my password is incorrect but its definitely not - I logged out and then back in to lemmy.world website to double check.

    I'm definitely setting the instance to lemmy.world (which is running a version above 0.18) and I've tried using my username and then email and I've cleared all browser stored data for the alexandrite.app domain - still keeps refusing my password :/

    Browser is Firefox 115.0 if that makes a difference.

    • Hmmm, that sounds odd, I'm not having that issue on lemmy.world myself. Are there any trailing spaces in the username or password?

      • No, but there is at least one hyphen.

        • Hmm, I tried adding hyphens all over and also \n to the password on one of my accounts but never had any issues. If you have any other weird characters in your password could you try updating your password to be something more "normal" and see if that has any issues?

          If you're familiar with browser dev tools, could you check the request body in the network tab for /instance?/setInstance and see if your password looks correct there?

          • Just looked - it's all there and correct...but it has just occurred to me that my password is very long, have you got a character limit on that field?

            • We might be getting somewhere! I do not have any limits, but I see on the official Lemmy UI they have a 60 character limit on the password field. Is your password longer than 60 characters? It's possible that your password was always getting cut off when logging in on lemmy.world, but now through Alexandrite it's trying to use the full length and now it doesn't match. Try entering only the first 60 characters of your password and try again.

              • I'm now replying to you from Alexandrite - so yes, that was it :)

                Never got a warning from Lemmy...weird.

                • Woo! I'll put the same 60 character limit on my login form then. Thanks for figuring this out with me!

                  It would appear the way it's setup with the hard character limit there's probably no good way for them to figure out if you were trying to input a longer password, since everything gets cut off at 60 regardless. Totally understandable though, not many people use that long of passwords.

                  • The way I've coded such things is just to count the length of the string in the field and then do an if() to test if's greater than or less than a specific length. I'm surprised Lemmy doesn't do that.

                    Thanks are due to you, not me, for helping me figure this out :)

                    • Hey I pushed some changes, including a 60 character maxlength. If you're self hosting the dev version you'll need to git pull, npm install again and re-run npm run dev. The npm install is because I had to add support for maxlength to the text inputs which I import from my own UI library, and I needed to bump the version for that.

    • I use FF 114.0.2 and have no issues

43 comments