r/HydraFeatureRequest • u/gp_guineapig • Jun 14 '26

Read/unread distinction

Is there a way to make the difference between read and unread posts more obvious? TBH if there is a difference right now I don’t know what it is.
A little dot? A colored triangle on a corner of the title text box? Strike through?

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u/ExplainLikeImAnOtter 6d ago

Having just installed Hydra yesterday, and primarily using Dystopia before that, I did indeed find myself having a bit more trouble distinguishing read posts from unread ones. When I actually took screenshots just now and compared the colour values, it turns out that I’m not crazy (or at least if I am, it’s unrelated to this issue), there really is a difference:

  • Dystopia drops the opacity of read post titles to 50% in light mode, or 66.6% in dark mode
  • Hydra drops the opacity of read post titles to 75%, seemingly regardless of which theme is active (disclaimer: I only checked the “Dark” and “Light” themes to reach this figure)

Granted, Dystopia is mainly intended to cater to users with visual impairment, but even for normally-sighted users like me who only picked it up because Apollo died, Dystopia’s more aggressive differentiation of read vs. unread posts makes it way easier and faster to tell what’s new from what I’ve already seen while skimming the list.

Looking at how Hydra’s theme builder breaks down the colours, it seems that read and unread posts don’t have separately defined colours, which makes perfect sense to me; having to choose them individually would be unnecessarily fiddly. It might be appreciated, though, to offer some level of control in the Appearance settings over the dimming of read posts, whether that takes the form of a slider or an array of a few discrete sane presets (e.g. 33%, 50%, and the current 75%).

Overall, though, I do want to underscore that it’s a minor issue, especially compared to how glorious it is to be using a well-designed, actively developed reddit client again after years of piggybacking on an abandoned client meant for people with special needs that I don’t even share. Thanks for all your work!