Dive Into Greasemonkey

Teaching an old web new tricks

1.4. Managing your user scripts

You can install as many Greasemonkey scripts as you like. Greasemonkey has a graphical configuration dialog to manage your user scripts: disable them temporarily, change their configuration, or uninstall them completely.

Procedure: Disable Butler temporarily

  1. From the menu, select ToolsManage User Scripts.... Greasemonkey will pop up a dialog titled “Manage User Scripts”.

  2. In the left-hand pane of the dialog is a list of all the user scripts you have installed. (If you've been following along from the beginning, then this will be just one script: Butler.)

  3. Select Butler in the list if it is not already selected, and deselect the Enabled checkbox. The color of “Butler” in the left-hand pane should change subtly from black to gray. (This is difficult to see while it is still selected, but more useful once you have dozens of scripts installed.)

  4. Click OK to exit the “Manage User Scripts” dialog.

Now Butler is installed, but inactive. You can verify this by searching for something on Google. It should no longer say “Enhanced by Butler” along the top. You can re-enable Butler by repeating the procedure and re-selecting the Enabled checkbox in the “Manage User Scripts” dialog.

[Note]

Although I refer to disabling a user script as “temporary”, it will remain disabled until you explicitly re-enable it. The only thing that's really temporary about it is that you can easily re-enable it without having to find the original script on my web site and re-install it.

You can also use the “Manage User Scripts” dialog to uninstall scripts entirely.

Procedure: Uninstall Butler

  1. From the menu, select ToolsManage User Scripts.... Greasemonkey will pop up the “Manage User Scripts” dialog.

  2. In the left-hand pane, select Butler and click Uninstall. There is no confirmation; the user script is immediately uninstalled.

  3. Step 3... There is no step 3! (With apologies to Jeff Goldblum.)

But wait, there's more! You can also change the configuration of user scripts you have previously installed. Do you remember that dialog you got when you first installed Butler, the one that had the two lists of sites to include and exclude? Well, you can change those parameters yourself, either at install time, or at any time in the “Manage User Scripts” dialog.

Let's say, for example, that you like Butler, but you have no use for it on Froogle, Google's product comparison site. You can modify the user script configuration to exclude that site, but still let it work on other Google sites.

Procedure: Reconfigure Butler to leave Froogle alone

  1. From the menu, select ToolsManage User Scripts.... Greasemonkey will pop up the “Manage User Scripts” dialog.

  2. In the left-hand pane, select “Butler”. In the right-hand pane, it should show you two lists, one of included pages (“http://*.google.*/*”) and one of excluded pages (blank).

  3. Next to the “Excluded pages” list, click Add....

  4. Greasemonkey will pop up a secondary dialog titled “Add Page” and prompt you to enter a new URL. Enter http://froogle.google.com/* and click OK.

  5. Back in the “Manage User Scripts” dialog, the excluded pages list should now include your new URL wildcard, http://froogle.google.com/*, meaning that Butler will not be executed on any page of the froogle.google.com site. The asterisk serves as a simple wildcard, and you may use it within any part of the URL: domain name, path, or even within the URL scheme (http://).

  6. Click OK to exit the “Manage User Scripts” dialog and search for a product on Froogle to verify that Butler is no longer being executed. It should still be executed on normal web search results, image search results, and other Google sites.

← Installing a user script
Your First User Script →