X Look

A reading mode for X that you can open at work

X Look is a small Chrome extension that takes the furniture off x.com. The left nav, the trends, Grok and the ads are gone. What is left is one quiet column of posts, and the pictures stay grey until you ask for them.

Download x-look.zip Source on GitHub
x.com with X Look on: the nav and the right rail are gone, the timeline sits alone in the middle, and a photo waits behind a grey tile.

What it changes on x.com

  • No left nav

    It is removed, not tucked behind a hover. On a narrow window X's own bottom bar stays, so you can still get around.

  • No right rail

    Search, “Subscribe to Premium”, today's trends and who-to-follow all go.

  • No Grok, no clutter

    The Grok and messages drawers go, and so do each post's Grok button, its view count, and the “Translated from …” and “Made with AI” lines.

  • No promoted posts

    Ads are dropped by their exact label, so an ordinary post that happens to say “promoted” stays.

  • A calmer timeline

    One 660px column in the middle, posts set in a serif at 17px with room between the lines, hairline separators, and the like and repost buttons dimmed until you hover.

  • Filter posts

    A small box in the empty space left of the column. Type a few words and only posts containing all of them stay; the rest fold into a thin line, and the box counts them.

  • On and off with one click

    Click the X Look icon in the toolbar to switch it off in every x.com tab, and again to bring it back. It remembers your choice.

  • Pictures and videos wait for you

    Each one becomes a small grey tile. Click a tile and only that item opens; a video starts playing when you do. A post with four photos opens one photo at a time.

  • Your theme stays yours

    X Look only changes layout and type. Light, dim and dark all keep working.

Install it in Chrome

  1. Download x-look.zip, the latest version, and unzip it into a folder you will keep. Chrome runs X Look from that folder, so don't delete it.
  2. Open chrome://extensions.
  3. Turn on Developer mode, top right.
  4. Click Load unpacked and choose the unzipped folder, the one with manifest.json in it.
  5. Open the puzzle-piece menu in the toolbar and pin X Look, so its icon is always in reach.
  6. Reload x.com.

Click the X Look icon to switch it off and on in every x.com tab; it remembers your choice. Its card in chrome://extensions links back to this site.

Update to a new version

Download x-look.zip again and unzip it over the same folder. In chrome://extensions, click the reload arrow on the X Look card, then reload x.com. Every version is listed on GitHub Releases.

Other browsers

It works in any Chromium browser. In Edge, open edge://extensions and turn on Developer mode in the left panel; in Brave, open brave://extensions. The other steps are the same.

From the source code

Run git clone https://github.com/cocodedk/x-look.git and choose the cloned folder in the Load unpacked step. The source on GitHub is always the newest code.

Privacy

X Look collects nothing and sends nothing anywhere.

  • It makes no network requests of its own: no analytics, no tracking, no ads, and no code loaded from a server.
  • It runs only on x.com and twitter.com and only changes how the page looks. It reads the page inside your browser to do that, and what you read stays there.
  • It stores one thing: whether it is switched on or off, in Chrome's extension storage on this computer. That is the only permission it asks for besides running on X, and the setting is not synced or shared.
  • The words you type in the filter box, and the count of hidden posts, live only in that tab's memory and are gone when you reload or close it.
  • It does not stop X from collecting data. X sees your visit as it would without X Look, and pictures and videos are still downloaded from X while they are hidden; X Look only keeps them out of sight until you click.
  • The code is open source under Apache-2.0, so you can check every line of this on GitHub.
  • This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics. It is hosted on GitHub Pages, which may log visitors' IP addresses (see GitHub's privacy statement), and it loads its fonts from Google Fonts, so your browser also contacts Google. Its WebMCP tools only read this page, in your browser.
  • Questions: bb@cocode.dk

Good to know

X changes its page often. X Look holds on to the few hooks X keeps stable, such as the banner, the primary column and the tweet itself, rather than generated class names, so it should rarely break. If it does, please open an issue on GitHub.

Created by Babak Bandpey.

Built by Cocode.