Hermes Kanban Readability

Hermes Kanban Readability

Reapplies two customizations to the Hermes Kanban dashboard plugin and installs them as a user-override so they survive hermes update / git pull of the bundled hermes-agent checkout.

The customizations

1. Clickable bare URLs — the card-description markdown renderer (renderInline in dist/index.js) only linkified [text](url) syntax, so GitHub-synced lines like Source: https://github.com/.../2802 stayed plain text. The patched renderInline autolinks bare http(s):// URLs (stashing any markdown links first so they aren't double-wrapped; trailing sentence punctuation is kept outside the anchor).
2. Readable card-text font — card titles/meta inherit Mondwest (a Hermes branding display face) at ~12.75px, which reads poorly for dense body text. A CSS override pins the readable system-ui sans stack (the same face the column headers already use) and bumps sizes: title → 0.95rem, meta → 0.8rem, id → 0.7rem.
3. Board overflow / scrollbar — the columns row lays the columns left-to-right at a fixed width (wider than most screens) but the bundled CSS hides the scrollbar, so off-screen columns are unreachable. The override restores a visible horizontal scrollbar and bounds column height so that scrollbar stays inside the viewport (calc(100vh - 290px); tune if a layout starts lower). All columns become reachable on smaller screens (e.g. ace-linux-2).

Why a user-override instead of editing the bundled plugin

The bundled plugin lives at <hermes-agent-repo>/plugins/kanban/dashboard/, inside the git checkout — dist/index.js and dist/style.css are git-tracked source (no build step), so any in-place edit is reverted on the next git pull / hermes update.

Dashboard-plugin discovery (hermes_cli/web_server.py::_discover_dashboard_plugins) scans, in order: user ~/.hermes/plugins/<name>/dashboard/ → bundled memory/ → bundled <repo>/plugins/. It dedups by manifest name, first match wins, so a user copy named kanban shadows the bundled one — and ~/.hermes/plugins/ is outside the repo where git pull can't touch it.

How to run

.claude/skills/devops/hermes-kanban-readability/install.sh

Idempotent and self-locating. Honors HERMES_HOME, HERMES_AGENT_REPO, and HERMES_BUNDLED_PLUGINS env overrides (defaults: $HOME/.hermes, $HERMES_HOME/hermes-agent, $REPO/plugins). After it runs, hard-refresh the Kanban tab (Ctrl+Shift+R). Re-run after every hermes update.

Verify

Read-only check (run after install / bootstrap; safe anywhere):

bash .claude/skills/devops/hermes-kanban-readability/verify.sh

Exit 0 = PASS (or N/A on a non-Hermes machine — guard no-ops); exit 1 = Hermes present but override missing/incorrect (then run install.sh). On a machine with a live dashboard it also confirms the board is serving kanban from the user override, not the bundled plugin.

Recovery / drift handling

• The installer always rebuilds the override from the current bundled plugin, then re-applies both customizations — so it picks up upstream kanban changes while keeping these two fixes layered on top.
• The CSS fix is append-based (later rules win on source order), so it's robust across upstream restyles.
• The JS fix does a literal find-replace of the original renderInline block. If upstream changes that function, the installer prints a WARNING and leaves JS unpatched (rather than silently failing). Re-derive the patched function then — see patches/.

Files

Provenance

Captured against NousResearch/hermes-agent commit 2c6bbaf35 (2026-05-26). Upstream-PR path (not taken here) would make the change durable via normal pulls; the autolink fix is a clean bugfix candidate, the font swap is a local preference that may conflict with Hermes's deliberate Mondwest branding.