How to use FocalReader

A walkthrough of the feel, not the mechanics.

Reading online used to mean losing your place every few paragraphs. A notification slides in from a corner. A sidebar starts autoplaying. Your eyes catch a headline in the margin, and suddenly you're three paragraphs ahead but unsure what you just read. FocalReader is a quiet fix for that — a band of light that follows where you're reading, with the rest of the page gently dimmed.

The first minute

Install the extension, open any article, and press Alt+Shift+F. That's the one command worth committing to muscle memory — it toggles FocalReader on and off anywhere on the web. Press it, move your cursor over a paragraph, and the page calms itself down: a horizontal band of light follows your cursor and everything else fades back.

Most people find that surprisingly calming on its own. The interesting part, though, is in the tuning.

Width: match it to how you read

By default the band spans the full width of your viewport. That's great when you want a cinematic strip — your mouse lazily tracks down the page and everything about line length and column width is handled for you.

When the page has visual competition on the sides — sidebars, comment widgets, a table of contents, share buttons — narrow the band so the dim overlay covers those too. You can nudge it smaller with Alt+Shift+← and wider with Alt+Shift+→; most people end up tapping these a couple of times the first day and then never again.

Widen the band back out when you're reading something with wide tables, code blocks, or very long sentences. If the band cuts off the middle of a table row or the end of a line of code, your eye will jump past the dim to see what's being hidden — which defeats the point entirely.

Height: match it to density

A shorter band — one or two lines tall — is best for dense material: academic papers, long-form essays, legal documents, anything where you want to focus on one sentence at a time. It forces a slower, deliberate pace. You can almost feel the band working as a pacer: it says "this sentence, now this one."

A taller band — four to six lines — is better for casual reading, where context above and below helps. News articles, blog posts, newsletters. Alt+Shift+↑ shrinks the band, Alt+Shift+↓ grows it. Try both, see what matches the page.

A simple rule to catch a mismatch: if you feel rushed and keep scrolling past the band to read what's below, it's too short. If you feel like you're reading without any focal centre at all, it's too tall. If the band ever drifts off-centre after resizing, Alt+Shift+C snaps it back under your cursor.

Tint and opacity: because screens read differently at night

Daytime reading is fine with the default dark tint — it reads like a gentle shade on a bright page. For late-night reading, open the popup and swap the colour to a warm amber. It turns the dimmed areas into a soft glow that's kinder on tired eyes than pure black. If the extension is making things feel heavier rather than calmer, dial the opacity slider down. The goal is "peripheral awareness muted," not "cave."

Auto Dim: for long reading sessions

When you stop moving for a moment, the page quietly dims a bit further. It's not a full blackout — more like the way a library goes slightly quieter when everyone finally settles in. Start moving again and the normal opacity comes back.

Auto Dim is designed for sitting down with something long. It rewards stillness, nudges you toward one paragraph at a time, and takes the "should I scroll yet" tension out of the moment. It's on by default; toggle it with Alt+Shift+A if you're reading in short bursts and want the page to stay at a steady opacity.

Smart Window: when you want the page to think for you

Smart Window is the feature that changes how reading feels. Instead of a fixed rectangle that only cares where your cursor is on the screen, the focal band snaps to the actual paragraph, heading, or section under your mouse. The band takes the exact shape and size of the block of text you're reading, whether that's a small heading, a long paragraph, or a nested list item.

Turn it on in the popup when you're reading something structured in blocks of wildly different sizes — long articles, documentation, research papers, Wikipedia deep-dives. It saves you from fiddling with width and height every paragraph. Once Smart Window is on, Shift+↓ jumps to the next block, Shift+↑ to the previous, and if a block feels too big or too small you can zoom with Shift+→ (into a smaller child) or Shift+← (out to the parent section, then out again to the whole article).

Smart Window is the one paid feature, with a 7-day free trial built in. Everything else stays free forever.

Locking on a paragraph

Here's a workflow that's hard to describe but very natural once you feel it: find the paragraph you want to focus on by hovering, then lock the band there.

With Smart Window on, hover around until the band snaps to exactly the block you want — usually two or three small cursor moves. Then press Alt+Shift+M. The band freezes on that paragraph. You can now move your cursor anywhere, click links, switch tabs, scroll through adjacent content — the focal band stays exactly where you put it.

This is the reading mode for deep work. You've told the extension "this is what I'm reading right now" and it takes you at your word. When you're done, press Alt+Shift+M again to unlock, let Smart Window snap to the next paragraph, and lock again. It becomes a small ritual — find, lock, read, unlock, move on.

When it doesn't belong

Sometimes you're not reading — you're searching Google, filling a form, watching a video, browsing an admin dashboard. The overlay gets in the way in those cases. From the popup on any site, toggle "Pause on this site" and FocalReader will quietly stay out. It's specific to that hostname, so pausing it on Google doesn't affect anything else, and subdomains inherit — pausing google.com also pauses mail.google.com and docs.google.com. You can unpause any time from the same toggle, or manage the full list from the Settings page.

The part that no one says

A reading focus tool doesn't work by making you try harder. It works by removing decisions you didn't realise you were making: where to start this paragraph, whether that sidebar link is interesting, whether to scroll faster. With the right setup, those decisions quietly disappear and you read at your natural pace.

Everyone's right setup is different. Try a wide-and-short band on a news article, a narrow-and-tall band on a textbook, Smart Window on a research paper you've been avoiding. The goal isn't to find the one true configuration — it's to find the one that matches what you're reading today.

More help

Bug, feature request, or just want to share how you use it? Join the community forum or email support@focalreader.com.