Tips & Tricks

## Tips & Tricks

A few notable, useful worth-sharing tips & tricks for Sharkey users. You may also suggest any to be added here.

Using comfortably on mobile/restricted environments

Sharkey works best via it's web UI frontend. Sometimes, this may be uncomfortable on mobile or generally lower-end devices.

You have a few options to try out:

- Try using a Chromium based browser to use Sharkey

- Sharkey performs notably better under a Chromium based environment, and if on Android, may also use less battery in the process.

- For iOS users, this option may not be helpful/do no change at all.

- Try using the Aria client, as we suggest for mobile users.

- It's a native, basically 1-to-1 compatible Misskey client. While it's focused on supporting Misskey features, it also supports some of the Sharkey features such as editing.
- They also provide builds for anything other than mobile devices, including native builds for Windows, Mac and Linux.

- Disable all effects and animations in the client settings

- Go to your Preferences
- Look under the "Accessibility" and "Performance" tab. You can disable UI animations, MFM, and blur effects.

- Use a Mastodon client

- As Mastodon is more popular, there a lot of clients for Mastodon that perform better in all cases. However, Sharkey's Masto-API implementation isn't great, and may ultimately be a worse experience over the other methods provided.

Disable the "Widgets" sidebar

In the normal UI view, Sharkey has a permanent sidebar that holds widgets on the right side of the UI, which cannot be disabled. It, however, is not required in any way for normal usage, so we may use custom CSS on the client in order to remove it.

Simply go to your custom CSS settings and add the below snippet:

{% highlight css %} [class^="universal-widgets-"] { display: none; } {% endhighlight %}

Once applied and refreshed, the widgets sidebar should now be gone. Note that this won't effect the sidebar that appears on mobile (opened through a button on the navbar) so it's safe to use this CSS on mobile as well, in the case of client settings syncing.