Lore Reader

A Browser extension that gives lore.kernel.org message pages a proper reading view: an author card, one-click reply, a real diff renderer, and a collapsible thread sidebar. It never edits the page's actual text, it just builds a nicer view next to it and hides the raw <pre> blocks. Click "Raw" any time to get the untouched original back.

Light theme

Dark theme

Why

lore.kernel.org sends each message as one giant <pre> tag: headers, body, thread overview, and reply instructions all mashed into plain text. Great for scripts, rough to read when you're trying to figure out who's replying to what in a forty-message thread. This extension parses that same text lore already sends and lays it out like a normal mail client, without touching lore itself or needing an account, sync, or server.

Features

• Author card with a color-coded initial avatar and the subject set large and bold, so you know whose email you're reading and about what before anything else.
• A "Reply by email" button wired to lore's own pre-filled mailto: link, plus buttons to copy the git send-email command and the To/Cc recipient list.
• Thread sidebar: the flat ASCII thread overview becomes an indented, clickable tree, with the current message highlighted.
• Diffs get their own collapsible sections with a +N -N badge and colored add/remove/context lines. Diffstat lines and cover-letter patch lists link straight to the matching diff or thread entry.
• Long quote chains collapse to "N quoted lines" so the new text in a reply is what you see first, not four levels of >>>>.
• Bare URLs and <message-id@example.com> references become clickable links.
• A theme picker in the popup: Auto matches whatever lore is already showing, or force Light/Dark/216dark/216light/VS Code Dark for the whole page. Font size too (S/M/L).
• A toggle in the popup turns the whole thing off instantly and reverts every processed page back to the original.

Pages without a message body, like list views and search results, get a lighter fallback: the old per-<pre> diff/quote/link highlighting, without the full card-and-sidebar layout.

Install

There's no Web Store or AMO listing yet, so it's a local install either way. One manifest.json covers both browsers, the code only touches chrome.storage and navigator.clipboard, both of which Firefox supports under the same chrome.* namespace.

Chrome / Edge / any Chromium browser:

1. Clone or download this repo.
2. Open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, click Load unpacked, and pick the folder.
3. Open any lore.kernel.org message page.

Firefox:

1. Clone or download this repo.
2. Open about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox, click Load Temporary Add-on, and pick manifest.json inside the folder.
3. Open any lore.kernel.org message page.

Firefox drops the temporary add-on on restart, so you'll need to reload it each session unless you sign it through AMO. Chrome and Firefox both refuse to run a sideloaded packaged build outside of developer/debugging mode anyway, so packaging one wouldn't save you a step.

Privacy

No network requests, no accounts, no analytics. The only browser APIs it touches are chrome.storage.sync (to remember your theme and font settings) and navigator.clipboard (only when you click a Copy button).

Design notes

I didn't want the usual rounded-card, blue-pill SaaS look, so the card, sidebar, and buttons borrow PatternFly's visual language instead: the flat surfaces and thin borders you'd recognize from Cockpit or the OpenShift console. Reply actions sit in one horizontal row like an ordinary mail client, and the diff, quote, and message body stay monospace to match lore itself.

If something looks wrong

Any parsing hiccup falls back to the original raw page instead of shipping a half-built layout, and logs why to the console. Open devtools (F12), check the Console tab for a line starting with [Lore Reader], and open an issue with that line if you hit one.