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The butter handbook.

Everything butter does, how it does it, and the small details that make it feel like the dashboard you wish you had. Skim the overview, then drill into a widget.

butter is a new tab dashboard for Chrome. You pick widgets, drop them where you want them, and your tab quietly turns into the thing you actually look at a hundred times a day. The handbook is here to help you set it up well — and show off everything tucked behind a settings panel you might never open.

Three places to land, depending on where you are:

Install butter

Add it to Chrome, open a new tab, and you're in.

Two-minute setup
Your first dashboard

A guided tour: add a widget, resize it, theme it, save it.

Five minutes, end to end
Keyboard shortcuts

E edit · A add · , settings · ? help.

The full reference

How butter is put together

The dashboard is a grid. Widgets sit on the grid. Each widget is independent — its own settings, its own data, its own little corner of the page — and you compose the dashboard you want by mixing them. There's no master config, no theme that overrides per-widget options, no rules to memorise. If a widget can do a thing, the toggle for it lives in that widget's settings.

A few ideas worth knowing before you go deeper:

  • Edit mode is a place you visit. Press E and the grid lights up — drag handles, resize handles, an "add widget" tile. Press E again and you're back to the read-only dashboard. Everything you do in edit mode autosaves.
  • Your data lives on your device. Layouts and per-widget data are stored in Chrome's extension storage. Cross-device sync rides on Chrome's own sync — we don't host a server for your dashboard. The exception is the AI Inbox, where titles are sent off-device for triage; that page is explicit about what gets sent.
  • Integrations sign in once. GitHub and Linear use OAuth. We never see your tokens or what they unlock — the extension talks to the API directly. If you ever want out, one click revokes access.
  • Keyboard first, mouse welcome. Every modal, every setting, every shortcut works without leaving the home row. The ? overlay shows you the lot.

All fourteen widgets

Each widget has its own page with screenshots, every setting explained, and a few tips you wouldn't get from poking around the UI. Start with whichever one you'd use first.

Build the dashboard you want

Once you've got the basics, the guides walk you through composing the dashboard around a specific way of working — three opinionated builds you can copy outright or use as a starting point.

  • The dev dashboard. GitHub PRs, Linear queue, a focus timer, and quick links to the dashboards you actually open. The AI Inbox tells you where to start.
  • The focus dashboard. A Pomodoro front and centre, todo and scratchpad alongside, a clock and a quote. Everything else hidden.
  • The reading dashboard. Hacker News and Reddit doing the work of an RSS reader, plus a small set of quick links to your usual stops.

Can't find what you're looking for? The FAQ answers the questions we get most — billing, sync conflicts, integrations that won't connect, what to do when a widget feels stuck. If your question isn't there, the privacy page covers the data side, and you can always email us from inside the extension.