LearnTube

Turn YouTube into a calm place to learn. LearnTube is a tiny, open-source Manifest V3 extension for Chromium browsers that strips the distractions out of YouTube and reshapes it into a focused study tool — from one master on/off switch, with a per-surface switch for any piece you want handed back.

No build step, no dependencies, no tracking. The source files in this repository are the shipped extension.

➜ Install LearnTube from the Chrome Web Store

Features

• One master switch. Click the toolbar icon to toggle the entire rework on or off. Off means plain, untouched YouTube — instantly.
• A switchboard of nine switches. Under the master switch, the popup gives you a switch per distraction — Hide Shorts, Hide watch suggestions, Hide comments, Hide end screens & cards, Simplify the top bar, Replace Home with your Library, Show feed button, Start on Subscriptions, and Speed buttons on videos. Each hide hands that piece of YouTube back to native when you flip it off; Show feed button, Start on Subscriptions, and Speed buttons on videos switch off LearnTube's own additions instead. The defaults are the classic LearnTube 1.0 experience plus the feed button and the speed control.
• Shorts, gone. Shorts shelves, tiles, the sidebar entry, and a channel's Shorts tab are hidden site-wide, whatever language YouTube is set to, and a link to a Short opens that video in the normal player (Back won't bounce you into a Short). Flip Hide Shorts off and Shorts return.
• Subscriptions as an inbox. Your Subscriptions feed becomes a compact, two-line text list (channel name above, title below). Videos you've opened dim like read mail, you can star creators, filter to your VIPs, and save a video to a learning topic — all without leaving the page, including on rows that load as you scroll. A collab video shared by several channels has no one creator to star, so it shows no star (its ··· menu still works). Like the List Peek below, the inbox draws video rows only — an in-feed ad has no two-line form, so it isn't drawn there.
• A Learning home — with Peek. The recommendation-stuffed home page is replaced with your own library: add YouTube playlists as "topics" — paste a playlist's link into the Library, or press the ＋ Add to LearnTube button LearnTube adds to the playlist page's own header — and LearnTube tracks how far through each one you are, with a quiet "Continue where you left off" row and a per-course lecture checklist. Adding a topic hydrates it right away with a background fetch of the playlist's own page, so the title, lecture count, and order show up immediately; that first fetch only reads the playlist's initial batch of lectures (typically the first ten to seventeen), so a long course fills in the rest — and picks up real watch progress — when you open its playlist page (YouTube shows the first hundred lectures; on a longer list, scroll to the end once and LearnTube records each row as it loads). Progress is otherwise read off YouTube's own resume bars, only for playlists you've added, and you can tick (or un-tick) a lecture by hand when the scrape and reality disagree. Continue, Resume, the lecture rows, and a lecture page's Back / Previous / Next / Up next links switch pages in-app, as quickly as YouTube's own Next button, instead of reloading YouTube. Whatever you're typing in the Library — a new topic name, a pasted link — stays put while progress updates from another tab. Press Show feed to reveal, on request, exactly what the algorithm would have shown you — underneath your topics, in a calm two-line List or a Grid view, three across on a wide window (your choice is remembered). It's display-only; peeking never feeds the algorithm. The List view draws video rows only — an in-feed ad, or the banner ad YouTube sometimes puts at the top of the feed, has no two-line form, so it isn't drawn there; the Grid view keeps every ad with YouTube's own Sponsored labels (the top banner ad is only fitted to the column), and the native feed with LearnTube off is YouTube's own.
• Block a channel for good. Open a video's ordinary ⋮ menu — YouTube's own, on a home or Peek card, or the watch page's sidebar — and pick 🚫 Block this channel. That creator's videos then leave everywhere recommendations render: both Peek views, the native home feed, the watch-page sidebar and grid shelves. Blocks sync across your devices; unblock from the popup's Blocked list. Blocking is context-aware, so it never hides rows inside a playlist or course, on the watch-page queue, on your own Subscriptions feed, or on a channel's own page — those are always left alone, and the search results page is left alone too (see below).
• Fewer distractions everywhere. Watch-page "up next" suggestions, comments, and end-screen cards are removed — on a lecture inside one of your topics, an Up next ▾ pill brings back just the coming lectures' titles on demand, and a ← Previous lecture pill sits alongside it so you can step back without leaving the focus strip — and the masthead is reclaimed down to [logo · search · account]. Chapters, the transcript, the full description, Ask, and live chat still open when you ask for them — beside the player, the way YouTube draws them; close the panel and the player centers again. While one is open, the side column shows only that panel (the suggestions, the playlist panel and the column's ad slots stay hidden, as before). Hiding the end wall also cancels the autonav countdown behind it, via the player's own per-video Cancel button; if that button can't be found by the end of a short retry window, LearnTube falls back to switching off YouTube's own Autoplay setting instead — a persisted YouTube preference, not a per-video action — so nothing plays itself unannounced.
• A speed control on every watch page. A − speed + pill sits by the player — in the focus strip on a course lecture, standalone under the player elsewhere — so you can nudge playback without hunting through YouTube's own menu. − and + step by an amount you pick in the popup (0.25×, 0.5×, or 1×), across a 0.25×–4× range that reaches beyond YouTube's own 2× ceiling; click the readout to snap straight back to 1×. Your chosen speed sticks for the session and follows you from video to video, but only while you're on a watch page — leave it (back to search, the Library, or another tab) and the playing video, including a miniplayer, returns to normal speed until you're back on a watch page. A popup switch, Speed buttons on videos, hides the control entirely. The same two steps are on the keyboard — [ slower, ] faster by default, both rebindable in the popup (click a key box, press the key you want — Esc cancels and Backspace or Delete restores the default, so those keys can't themselves be bound, and neither can Tab, Enter, or the function keys). The keys only work on a watch page, never while you're typing in the search box, and go quiet with the switch off. LearnTube never speeds up an ad: while one plays, the control dims ("Speed returns after the ad") and neither it nor the keys act; your speed comes back the moment the video does. (If YouTube itself resets the speed mid-video — rare — press + to set it again.)
• Search is left alone. LearnTube doesn't touch the results page at all — no lens, no toolbar, no restyle — so you get YouTube's own search, at YouTube's own speed. The one exception is the Shorts switch: when it's on, Shorts shelves and Shorts results are hidden there too (turn the switch off and search shows them again). Blocked channels can still appear there.
• No silent failures. If Chrome refuses a change you make — LearnTube's synced storage is full, or sync is rate-limiting — one calm line at the foot of the page says what wasn't saved (the popup says so inline; click the line to dismiss it), and whatever you typed into the Library stays in its box. On a video it sits at the top instead, clear of the player's controls while the page is scrolled to the top. Each kind of synced data (switches, topics, stars, blocks) has its own room, so a big Library can't crowd out the rest. And when LearnTube updates or is turned off, a YouTube tab that was already open says "LearnTube was updated or turned off — reload this tab." with a Reload button, rather than quietly dropping what you do there.

Everything is display-only: LearnTube never reorders your feed or touches YouTube's recommendation algorithm. It only hides, restyles, and adds its own calm UI on top.

Install

Install from the Chrome Web Store → — click Add to Chrome and you're set. LearnTube needs Chrome 111 or newer (or a Chromium browser built on 111+).

Prefer to run it from source? Load it unpacked:

1. Download this repository — clone it, or download the ZIP and unzip it somewhere permanent (don't delete the folder later; the browser loads the extension from this location).
2. Open your browser's extensions page:
   • Chrome: chrome://extensions
   • Edge: edge://extensions
   • Brave: brave://extensions
3. Turn on Developer mode (toggle in the top-right on Chrome/Brave, in the left sidebar on Edge).
4. Click Load unpacked and select this project folder (the one containing manifest.json).
5. Open https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions and you're set.

Click the LearnTube toolbar icon any time to flip the master switch.

Privacy

LearnTube is private by design:

• No data is collected, sold, or shared. There are no servers, no analytics, and no accounts.
• All state lives on your device in the browser's own storage (your settings — the switches, your topics, stars, and your blocked-channel list — sync via your own browser account if you have sync on; watched progress, lecture ticks, and read/archived state stay local). Nothing is ever sent off-device by the extension.
• No remote code. The extension runs only the JavaScript and CSS bundled in this folder — nothing is ever downloaded and run. The one network call it makes itself is a same-origin fetch of the page of a playlist you've added as a topic, to read that playlist's own public title/lecture data; see PRIVACY.md for details.

See PRIVACY.md for the full policy.

How it works

• content.js runs at document_start and toggles a single CSS class on the page's <html> element. Because <html> is never replaced during YouTube's single-page navigation, that class — and therefore the whole reskin — survives moving between pages without polling or re-injection. The script also handles the few jobs CSS can't: the /shorts/* redirect, the injected Learning home, the Subscriptions inbox controls, and reading your watched-progress off the page.
• spa-nav.js is a small script that runs in the page's own context — the only place YouTube's in-app router can be reached. When you click one of LearnTube's own links, it hands the address to YouTube exactly as YouTube's own links do. One addition, on ‹ Back to only: so the lecture doesn't play on in a miniplayer over the course, it briefly sets YouTube's own in-page flag web_watch_disable_playlist_auto_miniplayer (handed back, as it was, when the hop ends) and, should a miniplayer open anyway, clicks that miniplayer's own Close button. It stores and sends nothing.
• subscriptions-list.css does all the visual work. Rules are either page-scoped (reshaping the layout of one page) or site-wide (hiding distractions everywhere). Switch the master off and the class disappears, so nothing matches and plain YouTube returns.

Permissions

• storage — to save your settings and progress on your device.
• Access to https://www.youtube.com/* — so the content script can restyle YouTube. The extension runs on YouTube and nowhere else.

If it ever breaks

YouTube periodically renames its internal page elements, which is the most likely cause of a silent break (e.g. Subscriptions reverting to its default layout). Open the affected page, right-click the element → Inspect, and check whether the tag/id names still match those in subscriptions-list.css. Update what changed, then click reload (↻) on the extension and hard-reload every open YouTube tab (a tab that was already open keeps the old copy until you do — LearnTube will say so). Issues and pull requests are welcome.

License

MIT © 2026 Jenish Shobhit