Minimalist Gmail by Matt Constantine | Hacker News Reader

Minimalist Gmail by Matt Constantine

mattconstantine.com

67 pointsChirag23 comments

No mention of Helvetimail (http://www.josefrichter.com/helvetimail/) yet?

This removes many of the features I use regularly. Generally the only reason I use the web interface is to search, to mark items read, and to mark all those junk messages which my desktop email client already classified as junk.

So this removes 66% or more of the features I actually use.

But you can select what to hide and what not (link in the upper right corner).

I like the fact that it is possible to switch off/on individual parts of the website (link in the upper-right corner). It would be cool if someone came up with a general solution applicable to all websites.

For a case-by-case basis, check out the Printliminator -- really neat use of JS & CSS to hide pesky elements

http://css-tricks.com/examples/ThePrintliminator/

Now if this could be scripted with greasemonkey! Imagine getting rid of a few elements, then hitting 'save' in the plugin -- any subsequent visits to the page would apply the relevant css.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/737

YouTube would be nice. I'm using a Greasemonkey script (http://pastie.org/674946) but it requires some management to keep up with changes.

Quietube? http://quietube.com/

Very nice application. I have been looking for something like this for quite a while now.

I just installed it and the largest problem I'm having is with access to search. Hitting '/' no longer focuses the search box and hitting the arrow is cumbersome. Anyone have a workaround aside from enabling the clunky header?

Has anyone seen this same work applied to Google Reader? There's quite a large header that takes up a lot of space on my netbook screen. I didn't see anything on the zenhabits.com site after a quick search either.

Maybe I just need to start tinkering...

http://helvetireader.com/

Thanks - I'll check that out when I get home.

And also for maps.google.com, the interface is way too big in my opinion.

Anyone know what their chat status is while chat is hidden?

Just a heads up, for some reason it didn't work too too well in Firefox 3.0.x; I didn't investigate further. It's fine in the latest 3.5 though.

Ditto for 2.0.0.3 --- installed fine without complaint, but didn't seem to have any effect on viewing.

This makes Gmail, what is should have been.simple and Just Email App. +1

If this is greasemonkey script, anyone tried it with Chrome?

great link/look, just wish it was available in a more general-purpose form (ie not a firefox tool)

It looks like the guts of what Matt Constantine put into the Firefox add-on is covered by the userscripts mentioned here:

http://zenhabits.net/2009/09/minimalist-gmail-how-to-get-rid...

I'd guess that the Zen Habits article came first and then the Firefox extension was made for an easy one-click installation.

Edit: I'm having trouble getting those userscripts to run in my Gmail Fluid app. Maybe there's some Greasemonkey-specific stuff going on in there...

My minimalist gmail interface is called "pine", which I believe is still considered to be the reference IMAP client implementation. If I were have to make this decision today, I might use something more powerful and extensible like "mutt", but for me pine is just fine.

I started using it again a year back or so when Mail.app became too slow for me to use on some giant mailboxes I have. Deleting 5k messages from an IMAP folder in pine takes maybe 5-10 seconds. Try doing that in Mail.app. I found my email productivity went way up after switching, so I ended up using it exclusively, despite the ribbing my co-workers give me for using prehistoric email tools.

Alpine is UW's successor to Pine:

http://www.washington.edu/alpine/

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