Hide & Highlight — Job Tools

A Chrome extension that runs on every site:

1. Hide button (all sites) — hover a card and a single floating Hide button appears at its top-right; clicking it removes the card from view. Hidden cards are saved automatically and stay hidden across reloads. Open the settings page from the popup (Other settings) to search, filter and restore them.

   Hide by company (LinkedIn) — on the settings page's Companies tab, type a company name and every job card from that company is hidden (case-insensitive, matches company names containing the text). Remove a name from the list to unblock it. The list is shared across profiles the same way hidden jobs are.

2. Keyword highlighter (all sites) — color your chosen words (languages, "Easy Apply", etc.) anywhere on the page. Matches are shown bold on a colored background so they stand out, managed on the settings page's Keywords tab. (The no-DOM technique can't change font-size, so "bold" is rendered via text-stroke.)

3. Hide "Easy Apply" jobs (LinkedIn only) — off by default. When on, every job card LinkedIn labels "Easy Apply" is removed from view, the same way a manually hidden card is. It matches the visible footer label rather than a class name (LinkedIn's class names churn, the label doesn't), and only an exact leaf-node match counts — a job description that happens to mention "Easy Apply" in a sentence is not hidden. Nothing is stored: turn the toggle off and the cards come straight back.

4. Viewed tint (LinkedIn only) — a job card is given a background tint once it's been viewed. A card counts as viewed if LinkedIn labels it "Viewed" or if you click it — the extension tracks your clicks itself, because LinkedIn doesn't show its own "Viewed" label on the job that's currently open. Viewed cards are tinted, never hidden.

On LinkedIn, Hide identifies a posting by its title + company, so clicking it hides every card with that role at that company — including duplicate/re-posted listings elsewhere in the results, and copies that scroll into view later. On every other site the button hides one card, keyed by a per-page content signature.

The extension never injects elements into a site's cards — the only thing it ever does to a card is toggle a CSS class (tint or hide), and the Hide button is a separate floating element. This avoids disturbing a site's own rendering (e.g. LinkedIn applying its "Viewed" marking when you click a job).

Where hidden cards are stored

Hidden cards are stored automatically as records of { title, company, country, logo, url, timestamp } keyed by the card's signature — no Export step needed. The popup's Other settings button opens the settings page (hidden.html, also reachable via Options on chrome://extensions). Its Hidden jobs tab lists every hidden card with its logo, title, company and country, and lets you search by text, filter by site or time range, sort, Restore individual cards, or Clear all. (Your viewed-click history is stored alongside it.)

By default the data lives in this profile's chrome.storage.local.

Sharing across Chrome profiles (optional)

To make every profile show the same clicked/hidden jobs (used one profile at a time), install the bundled native host — see native-host/README.md. It stores the state in a single local JSON file (native-host/shared-state.json) that all profiles read and write through a small Node helper. Flow:

content.js ──► background.js ──(native messaging)──► host.js ──► shared-state.json

Step-by-step setup, what exactly is shared, and troubleshooting for a stuck "Off" badge are all written out on the settings page under Sync & backup.

A profile loads the file when a page opens, and on each click/hide it sends only that change (a delta op) to the host, which merges it into the file. So profiles never overwrite each other — every profile's clicks/hides accumulate in the one file, and a restore/clear removes only the specific item. If the host isn't installed, the extension falls back to per-profile chrome.storage.local.

A long-open profile also stays in sync: it re-reads the shared file every minute (a background alarm) and immediately when you switch back to its window/tab, so it picks up what other profiles changed without needing a reload.

Install (unpacked)

1. Open chrome://extensions.
2. Turn on Developer mode (top-right).
3. Click Load unpacked and select this folder.
4. Open any page — the Hide button and highlighter work everywhere; the "Viewed" background tint only runs on LinkedIn.

Using the highlighter

Click the toolbar icon to open the popup. The popup holds only the switches:

• The switch in the top-right of the header is the master on/off for the whole extension. When it's off, the four feature toggles below are dimmed and nothing runs. The first three are on by default; Hide "Easy Apply" jobs is off by default, since it removes cards from view.
• Highlight keywords master toggle turns all painting on/off.
• Other settings opens the settings page, where everything else lives.

On the settings page's Keywords tab:

• Add group creates a keyword group: a label, comma-separated words to match, and a colour.
• Each row has pause (⏸), edit (✎), and delete (🗑). The filter box narrows the list.
• Text color (black/white) is auto-chosen for contrast against the background color.
• Matching is case-sensitive. A term is highlighted only where the page uses the same capitalisation you typed — Java skips java, GoLang skips golang. List each spelling you want to catch (Node.js, NodeJS, nodejs).
• Matching is whole-word. A term never matches glued inside a longer word: Go is highlighted in Go, Python and (Go) but not in ArgoCD, Google or Mongo. The edges are lookarounds ((?<![\p{L}\p{N}]) … (?![\p{L}\p{N}])) rather than \b, because \b is defined against word characters and so breaks on terms that begin or end with punctuation — \b.NET\b would never match .NET and \bC#\b would never match C# .
• Longer terms win over shorter ones, so Node.js is highlighted as one match rather than Node plus .js, and GoLang beats Go.

The settings page follows your system light/dark theme; the icon in its header cycles system → light → dark.

A few example groups are seeded on first run; edit or delete them freely.

How the painting stays safe

The highlighter uses the CSS Custom Highlight API (CSS.highlights). It finds matches by walking text nodes, builds Range objects, and registers them under a named highlight per group with a generated ::highlight() style rule. No DOM element is ever created, inserted, or moved — the page markup is completely untouched. That's why it can't break LinkedIn's card click handlers (a problem that DOM-rewriting highlighters cause by detaching React's event wiring) and can't interfere with existing tags.

Carrying settings between profiles

• Shared automatically: keyword groups live in the same shared file as the clicked/hidden jobs (native-host/shared-state.json), so adding, editing, pausing or deleting a group on one profile changes the file immediately and every other profile picks it up — no export/import needed. Groups merge by group id, so two profiles editing different groups don't overwrite each other's list. Without the native host installed they fall back to this profile's chrome.storage.local. Only the on/off toggles remain per-profile (chrome.storage.sync). Groups that were already in chrome.storage.sync from an older version are moved into the file automatically the first time the new version loads.
• Bundled defaults: defaults.json seeds the keyword groups on install (via the service worker), so loading the extension on another Chrome profile starts with your groups already in place. Edit defaults.json to change them — the easiest way is to tune them on the settings page, Export settings, then paste that file's contents into defaults.json.
• Auto-saved settings file: with the native host installed, every keyword change is also written to linkedin-job-tools-settings.json in the extension folder, in the same shape Export settings produces — so there's always a readable, up-to-date copy to open or commit, without pressing Export. Keys already in that file (toggles from an earlier export) are preserved; only highlightGroups is replaced, and a savedAt timestamp is added. It is written one-way: shared-state.json stays the source of truth, and hand-editing the settings file changes nothing until you Import it. Card clicks and hides don't rewrite it — only keyword changes do.
• Export / Import: the settings page's Sync & backup tab has Export settings (a JSON of all toggles + groups) and Import settings (loads one back). Use this to copy your exact setup to another profile or machine.

Files

File	Purpose
manifest.json	Manifest V3 config.
content.js	Hide button + hidden/seen storage, viewed tint, highlighter.
content.css	Hide/tint rules and floating-button styling.
hidden.html/css/js	Settings page (registered as the extension's options page): Hidden jobs, Keywords, Companies, Sync & backup tabs.
theme.js	Resolves the settings page's light/dark theme before first paint.
background.js	Seeds defaults on install; bridges the page to the native host (shared state).
native-host/	Optional Node host + installer for sharing state across profiles via one JSON file.
defaults.json	Default keyword groups shipped with the extension.
popup.html/css/js	Toolbar UI: master switch + the four feature toggles, and the Other settings button.
icons/	Extension icons.

Notes

LinkedIn changes its CSS class names periodically. If the LinkedIn "Viewed" tint or its Hide button stops working, update CARD_SELECTORS in content.js. The "Viewed" detection matches the exact label text and is fairly stable.

On non-LinkedIn sites a "card" is any article, li, or element with role="listitem"/role="article" that's large enough to hold real content. Hidden cards are remembered by a hash of their text for the current page URL, so they stay hidden on reload. If a card's text changes substantially between visits, its saved hidden state won't match anymore. Turn the feature off per the Per-card Hide button toggle in the popup if the floating button is noisy on a particular site — that also reveals everything hidden while it's off. Use Other settings in the popup to open the settings page and restore individual cards from its Hidden jobs tab.