0.20.0 adds the first version of the "Unclutter Library", a modal you can open inside Unclutter by pressing TAB on your keyboard.

Your library shows articles you've opened and completed, sorted by time. You can also drag & drop articles into your reading queue and install the Unclutter New Tab extension (Chrome, Firefox) to access your queue from your new tab page.

There's much more to come for this, including:

• Reviewing highlights you created inside Unclutter
• Importing and exporting articles
• Using AI topic classification to organize articles

As always, just open an issue for anything to improve or add next!

This release makes Unclutter work better on more articles, and adds the element blocker mode to remove every distraction:

Internally, the page text detection has been significantly rewritten to avoid removing the main page text, to remove more non-text elements, and to clean up more empty space around the page headings.

For the last 5% of articles where this still doesn't work well (or where it misses some distractions), there are new buttons inside the "bug" tooltip in the top right of each page:

• Report page automatically creates a GitHub issue which I'll take a look at.
• Block elements allows you to immediately remove distracting page elements (see the gif above). This also creates a Pull-Request so everyone else gets your changes too.

See the docs for more details.

Many other things got fixed as well thanks to many bug reports by you all over the last weeks. Happy reading!

This release improves the article uncluttering algorithm, to make it work more consistently and to show the page changes it's performing. Hopefully, this makes activating the extension a nicer experience:

There's not much more to say this week! If you're curious, the orchestration of the animated page changes happens in transitions.ts, which took quite a bit of work to get right.

If you find bugs on certain article pages, please report them here!

This release adds social highlights to the extension! If you happen to visit one of the 24.795 currently supported articles you'll its most important ideas underlined in the article text. The number of these social highlights also appears on the extension icon when there are some.

Just click on the underlined text to see the related conversation on Hacker News or Hypothes.is: (here's how this works)

(This is a screenshot from Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid)

If you want to create your own public comment, annotate any text in the extension and configure the sync with Hypothes.is. Then you'll see a "globe" icon on your annotation to get replies from other readers.

Of course, this can be turned off via the toolbar in the top right of the article view. Showing the number of social highlights on the extension icon can be customized seperately in the extension settings. But if you do try out the feature, please let me know what you think!

For the next release, I'm taking a look again at some of the basics: fixing bugs in the uncluttering algorithm and making the entire process smoother. See you then!

This release improves the annotation functionality introduced in 0.12.0:

• Annotations now show up on the page outline (where available), so that you can quickly jump between different ideas.
• Next to the article title there's now a progress bar tracking the number of annotations you made on the page.
• Annotations can be turned off via the "pen" icon in the top right.
• Fixed bugs like limits to the possible number of annotations per page.
• UX improvements like automatically focusing the text field of created annotations.

You can also now press Alt+C (or ⌥+C on Mac) on your keyboard to activate the extension anywhere! (this is configurable in the settings)

Hopefully, these improvements make it easier to read great articles more deeply! The next release will add a reading time indicator and keyboard shortcuts.

You can now highlight & annotate articles! Just select any text and add an optional note.

Every annotation is saved automatically: by default in your local browser storage, or to the open Hypothes.is annotation service if you configure it. The latter allows you to see all your annotations in one place and to import them into note-taking tools (more details here).

Let me know what you think about this first version (either by creating an issue here or through the feedback form)!

Other changes:

• Clicking on the background behind articles no longer disables the uncluttered view, as that's often not wanted when interacting with annotations.
• Major new features now appear as messages inside the extension -- hello if you came from there!
• Other bug fixes.

The extension now shows an outline for articles! It automatically updates as you scroll down, and you can click any heading to quickly jump to that part of the page.

This release adds and improves the methods of activating the extension on articles:

• There's now an automatic popup message on cluttered articles. Click it to easily enable the extension. • Or right-click any link and select "Open Link with Unclutter". • The automatic activation feature per domain has been simplified, and the settings page for it has been redesigned. Domains aren't added to the allowlist by default now.

Thank you to everyone who suggested these features!

There is now a dark mode, thank you to everyone who suggested it! The extension automatically switches to it based on your system preferences, when you enable it manually via the "Aa" theme settings, or when the visited site uses a dark background by default.

Also, the theme settings (font size, page width, color theme) now apply globally, not only for specific domains as before.

Even if there are not many user-facing changes in this release, it contains a complete rewrite of the core website style parsing & patching algorithm. It now uses the CSSOM API instead of parsing CSS stylesheets using postcss -- this reduces the time it takes to unclutter a website by a few hundred milliseconds.

This means the animation when you enable or disable the extension should be much smoother and there should be fewer layout shifts.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/23430759/160899630-79956e04-405a-4b64-a6a6-4f282614c989.mp4

You can now change the text size, page width, and background color per website!

These theme settings are saved and automatically apply to other articles on the same website domain. Very small text is enlarged by default.

The extension now also removes excessive horizontal spacing from text paragraphs -- so articles should appear more consistent in general.

Thank you to everyone who suggested the font size feature!

Thank you everyone for the feedback! This update streamlines the extension settings, the next one will add more features!

• Moved the extension settings from the popup to the options page. This should reduce the friction of enabling the extension manually. • Added full list of all domain overrides to the settings page. • Added links to the extension settings and bug-report GitHub page in the top right of each article. • Replaced the "Unclutter $DOMAIN" switch with a cleaner icon next to the article. It still retains the same functionality, for more see the tooltip. • Improved the automatic detection of articles, resulting in fewer extension activations on non-articles.

The initial public release of the extension!

It supports:

• Uncluttering articles to make them easier to read.
• Automatic activation on pages you visit.
• Excluding or explicitly including certain website domains from the automatic activation.

(This was originally released on March 18, 2022.)