Userscripts: Nuclino Sidebar Toggle Shortcut

Nuclino is a great tool for teams and individuals to work together on documents. I use it as my primary note-tacking tool and store everything there that occurs to me during the day — lecture notes, TODOs, ideas, goals, diary entries…Seriously, you should check it out :-)

I like to use the keyboard as much as possible and try to avoid having to use my touchpad/mouse. Nuclino’s keyboard support is pretty good, several shortcuts exist (e.g. Escape to focus the search box, Ctrl+K to switch workspaces or teams, formatting shortcuts like Ctrl+B or *Ctrl+I work, too) so that using it solely with the keyboard is possible. 

But one thing which bothered me is the absence of a shortcut to toggle the sidebar. I try to keep the sidebar hidden at most times as I can focus more on the current document. So I wrote a small userscript to bind the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-H to the toggle button. I got this shortcut from the Brackets documentation (it wasn’t that easy to find a shortcut which is used by an existing editor and is not already used by a main browser). 

You can find the userscript on GitHub Gist. I developed it with the Tampermonkey extension in my mind, which is an extension available for most browsers (tested with Safari). To use my userscript with Tampermonkey (needs to be already installed), visit the Gist’s page and click on “Raw” in the right corner above the code. Tampermonkey will then ask you if you want to install the script:

Click install and from now on, you will be able to use Ctrl+Shift+H to toggle Nuclino’s sidebar!

One neat thing is that you will receive updates to the script automatically when I update the underlying source (e.g. when the CSS class of the button changes and I adjust the script), if you have enabled them. If you don’t trust me, simply create a new Tampermonkey script on your own and paste the code from my Gist into it.

Have fun using Nuclino keyboard-only!

Disclaimer: I used to work for Nuclino as a Freelance Software Engineer from October ‘16 until June ‘17.