This is not a guide, as you can find plenty of them on the web (well, at least for Greasemonkey)…
This is more of a quick and dirty solution to the problem “I just want this thing to be bigger/smaller/a different color” for some web page, and I’m highlighting the word “dirty” here 🙂
I’ll take feedly as an example.
I’m enjoying feedly as a replacement for Google Reader, but I can’t stand its oh-so-narrow central frame when I’m on a 1080p 24” screen.
This is how I “fixed” that.
First, you’ll want to produce the final result you’re aiming for with chrome/firefox developer tools; in Chrome:
- right-click on the element whose look you want to change and choose “Inspect element”
- move the mouse pointer up and down in the developer tools frame until you see a blueish highlight over the element you want to edit
- take note of the element’s type (a
<div>, a <p>, a <span>, an <img>, whatever it is) , id or class
- use the developer tools to change its looks (just add a custom style on the right under
element.style)
Google’s official tutorial on the subject is here.
Once you’ve got a decent looking page (in my case I changed some width and max-width attributes) you’re ready to create a greasemonkey/tampermonkey script that automatically applies those changes for you when you visit that page.
First, install greasemonkey or tampermonkey.
Then, create a new script (tampermonkey has a small icon with a page and a green plus on the top bottom right corner). In the header, the important tag is @match, which tells tampermonkey which pages this script must apply to (in my case, http://cloud.feedly.com/*).
Then, you can copy & paste this piece of code (that I found on the web, it’s used by many user scripts):
function addGlobalStyle(css) {
var head, style;
head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
if (!head) { return; }
style = document.createElement('style');
style.type = 'text/css';
style.innerHTML = css;
head.appendChild(style);
}
It’s a function you can call to add CSS rules to the page’s final CSS style.
Then, just call the function for all the styles you want to change using the CSS rules you found at step 3 before, in my case:
addGlobalStyle('.entryBody { max-width: 900px !important; }');
addGlobalStyle('#feedlyFrame { width: 1230px !important; }');
addGlobalStyle('#feedlyPage { width: 900px !important; }');
addGlobalStyle('.entryBody .content img { max-width: 850px !important; width: auto !important; height: auto !important; max-height: 600px !important;}');
All the !important markers are the dirty part: unless the page’s author used those herself (bad, bad author! :P) that tag ensures that your styles are being applied, no matter what. The great thing about !important (which is also the very bad thing) is that it makes styles overwrite definitions even if they’re specified within a style attribute in the element itself!
For example, in:
<div class="wide" style="width: 800px;">
the width value is always overridden by a CSS rule like this:
.wide {
width: 900px !important;
}
which is both awesome and awful depending on the context 🙂
Feedly has some style definitions like that, and that’s why I needed the !important flags.
Then, save the script and test it!
You can do a lot more than just stuffing your filthy CSS code, of course. I found this great userscript that makes feedly look like google reader (isn’t that what we all want from an RSS reader?), and if you look at the code the author works around the style problem by adding event listeners for DOMNodeInserted, because feedly has a webpage that is built with DOM manipulation performed by javascript. Much more sophisticated 🙂
The lesson here is: search userscripts.org first, and only then create your hacks!
something I did not know 