Replace hyphen in front of scores/reputation by minus

Question

(Actually a dupe of another question but that was incorrectly closed so I’m posting here until the other question gets reopened, and this one merged.)

This has bugged me for ages. The website uses hyphens in negative numbers throughout. It should use the minus sign instead.

Of course it’s not important. It just looks really ugly.

The new reputation reporting tracker (thumbs up!) makes this particularly obvious:

Jin and waffles say on the other thread that for the SO font, the dash actually looks better than the minus sign but I think they made a mistake: They might have used the en-dash accidentally, which does indeed look even worse than the hyphen here.

Answer 1

We won't be changing this, it adds way too much complexity to code that does something very, very simple...for very little benefit.

Answer 2

I’ll note that the recent achievements pop-up already uses true minus signs for reputation changes instead of hyphens.

Though this alone may not be enough to compel you to switch, Codidact doesn’t have this problem.

Here’s a userscript. The initial version took me about half an hour to write, so it did not require very much effort at all (and I am at a disadvantage in that I cannot easily identify every place where a negative value can appear, and fixing it up after-the-fact in the DOM adds considerable overhead; doing this server-side would be simpler and cleaner). This was easy to do. All it takes is some political will.

// ==UserScript==
// @name     Stack Exchange: minus signs
// @grant    none
// @run-at   document-start
// @match    https://*.stackexchange.com/*
// @match    https://*.superuser.com/*
// @match    https://*.stackoverflow.com/*
// @match    https://*.mathoverflow.net/*
// @match    https://*.serverfault.com/*
// @match    https://*.askubuntu.com/*
// @match    https://stackapps.com/*
// @exclude  https://api.stackexchange.com/*
// @exclude  https://data.stackexchange.com/*
// @exclude  https://openid.stackexchange.com/*
// @exclude  https://contests.stackoverflow.com/*
// @exclude  /^https?:\/\/winterbash\d{4,}\.stackexchange\.com\//
// ==/UserScript==

const SELECTOR = `
  .rep-down,
  .ob-post-votes,
  .js-vote-count,
  .js-vote-count > *,
  .js-discussion-score,
  .js-discussion-score > *,
  .mini-counts,
  .mini-counts > :only-child,
  .answer-votes,
  .js-metadata-vote-count,
  .s-activity-indicator,
  .s-post-summary--stats-item,
  .s-post-summary--stats-item-number,
  .s-badge,
  .s-badge > span:only-child,
  .js-followed-post .fs-body3,
  .vote-count-post,
  .vote-count-post > :only-child,
  .flex--item > div,
  .vote,
  .-stats,
  .movedDown,
  .bounty-indicator-tab,
  td.event-comment > span > span,
  .slick-cell.number
`;

const replaceHyphen = (obj, prop) => {
  const oldValue = `${obj[prop]}`;
  const newValue = oldValue.replace(/(?<=^|\s|[\[\(])\u002d(?=\d)/gu, '\u2212');
  if (oldValue !== newValue)
    obj[prop] = newValue;
};

const fixupNode = node => {
  if (!node.matches(SELECTOR))
    return;
  if (node.title)
    replaceHyphen(node, 'title');
  if (node.firstChild?.nodeType === document.TEXT_NODE)
    replaceHyphen(node.firstChild, 'data');
};

const fixupUnder = node => {
  fixupNode(node);
  for (const subnode of node.querySelectorAll(SELECTOR))
    fixupNode(subnode);
}

if (document.body)
  fixupUnder(document.body);

new MutationObserver(mutations => {
  for (const mut of mutations) {
    switch (mut.type) {
      case 'characterData':
        fixupNode(mut.target.parentNode);
        break;
      case 'attributes':
        fixupNode(mut.target);
        break;
      case 'childList':
        fixupUnder(mut.target);
        break;
    }
  }
}).observe(document, {
  childList: true,
  attributes: true,
  attributeFilter: ['title'],
  characterData: true,
  subtree: true,
});