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Draggable NYT Connections

An Extension/Bookmarklet to make the tiles in the NYT Connections game drag-and-droppable.

Usage

Browser Extension

Firefox

Available for Desktop and Android: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/draggable-connections/

Chrome

Google requires you to register and pay a (small) fee to publish to their webstore. It's also not possible to distribute Chrome extensions as files yourself for platforms other than Linux. Chrome also doesn't support extensions on mobile, and I'm guessing that's the place people more commonly play. I'll register and publish this to the store if there's interest (please file an issue), but not going to bother otherwise. Until then, you can load this as an unpacked extension. Git clone the repository and follow the Chrome documentaiton. Chrome will complain about the unrecognized browser_specific_settings field. This is because Chrome doesn't support this field and Mozilla requires it for API upload to AMO 🤷

Edge

I don't use Edge. I can look into publishing this to the extension store if there's interest. Edge does appear to support mobile extensions.

Opera

I don't use Opera. I can look into publishing this to the extension store if there's interest, but Opera doesn't support mobile extensions.

Safari

Apple charges you $100/year for the honor of publishing for their browser. I will not be doing that, but someone else is welcome to. I also don't own any Apple devices, so have no way to test.

Bookmarklet

If you can't install the extension, another option is a Bookmarklet. To create one, copy-paste the contents of bookmarklet/draggable.bookmarklet.encoded.txt into the URL field of a bookmark in your browser. Then after going to the connections page (and clicking play), execute the bookmarklet. If you're concerned about executing obfuscated code from the internet in your browser, good! Feel free to re-generate the bookmarklet:

  1. Run bookmarklet/create.sh to concatenate the relevant files into bookmarklet/draggable.bookmarklet.js.
  2. Use a tool like https://chriszarate.github.io/bookmarkleter/ to transform it into a bookmarklet.
  3. Paste that into the URL field of a bookmark in your browser.

Mobile

You can use bookmarklets on mobile Firefox and Chrome, but you have to get to them via the address bar instead of the bookmarks menu. See https://paul.kinlan.me/use-bookmarklets-on-chrome-on-android/ (Firefox is the same).

Compatibility

I have manually tested this in Firefox Desktop (131.0.2), Firefox Android (131.0.2), Chrome Desktop (129.0.6668.100) and Chrome Android (129.0.6668.100, bookmarklet only). AFAIK, I haven't used any exotic browser features, so it should work on any browser but very old browser versions might have issues.

Background

This is something I've wanted since the very first time I played the game and I think it's pretty weird that they haven't already implemented it. Recently I've been going for reverse-rainbow solves, which means you really have to get all 4 categories before you guess any and not being able to reorder is really annoying, so I whipped up a little script. I was inspired to use GSAP's Draggable plugin by this Reddit post where someone shared a standalone page where you can paste in the connections words and fiddle with them. I don't want to copy-paste things though.

Developing

Use web-ext to manage the extension. Run under npx unless you've added it to the path, e.g.:

npx web-ext lint

WSL

web-ext run doesn't work on WSL (wxt-dev/wxt#55). You have to build the extension and then load it as a temporary add-on. You may want to first bump the version in the manifest.json to get a new filename.

npx web-ext build

On Firefox on Windows, open a test profile (about:profiles) and then got to about:debugging and Load Temporary Add-on.... Locate the zip file in the web-ext-artifacts/ directory under the extension source directory on the WSL and load it. If you make a change in the source, rebuild the extension, overwriting the previous zip file.

npx web-ext build --overwrite-dest

and then on the about:debugging page Reload the temporary add-on. You will also likely need to reload the connections site.

Publish

See the Firefox docs for details. Most of the configuration is set in web-ext-config.mjs. You'll need to include your API key and secret, either in ~/.web-ext-config.mjs or on the command line. Don't put them in the git repository! Update amo-metadata.json release_notes and any necessary approval_notes (in particular if you add any new minified dependencies, see Firefox Third Party Library Usage docs. Then run

npx web-ext sign

Bookmarklet

If you made changes to the source code (as opposed to just) extension metadata, rebuild the bookmarklet

bookmarklet/create.sh

(you can also confirm that you didn't make any changes, in which case rerunning this shouldn't change anything).

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE.