What is RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite)?
RES stands for Reddit Enhancement Suite, and it’s a browser extension that adds a variety of extra features to your Reddit experience. Ask any dedicated Redditor what their favorite browser extensions are, and RES is sure to top their list. RES is completely free, open-source and donation driven, too, so click here if you’d like to contribute to the project in some way. They even accept Dogecoins, which, yes, are a real thing. Once you’ve installed it, it should automatically change your Reddit experience. Let’s talk about some ways RES changes things.
Browsing with RES
One of the first, most obvious changes that comes with RES is Never Ending Reddit. This simply allows endless scrolling. Other features you’ll see are detailed user profiles when hovering over them, a visible karma meter for how much karma you’ve given them personally, a counter for new comments on previously-read threads, and more. The convenience features offered by RES are numerous and what most people associate with the extension, but it turns out there’s a lot more to it than that. Let’s dive into actually customizing how it functions!
Customizing RES Settings
To change your RES settings, click the blue gear icon just below the top-right corner of your screen. Next, click RES settings console.
A window will pop up that offers access to all the settings you may want to change. You can also enable the NSFW filter or Night Mode here.
While this may look daunting on the outset, almost all of these options are self-explanatory. What you really want to do is pay attention to the left sidebar: each option gives a dropdown that offers access to the various, customizeable settings of RES. Let’s discuss what’s in each based on what you want to change.
My Account – Lets you set account-specific settings, including a quick Account Switcher, settings for Date and Karma displays, and more. Users – Offers access to the various User-based modules. This includes Quick Message and User Info. These are all enabled by default.
Comments – Various comment-oriented modules, including context tools, never-ending comments and more. Most of these are enabled by default, but Custom Comment Depth isn’t – enabling this will allow you to determine the “depth” of the comments you see. You can also set subreddit-specific comment depths. I recommend keeping this to “2” when browsing larger subreddits where comment chains can get out of control. Editing Tools – Allows you to change various RES editing options, such as your hotkeys for building and underlining text. You can also set macros here, too! Hide All Child Comments – Self-explanatory. No reason to disable, since it’s just a non-intrusive extra button you can ignore if you don’t want to use it. Live Preview – Enabled by default, one of the best features added by RES. You can change where and how it appears here. Submissions – Allows you to keep track of submissions by tracking new comments after you visit them and marks pages you’ve visited. Subreddits – Various subreddit-oriented features. Filtering NSFW subreddits, No Participation settings, etc. Appearance – Customize the look and feel of Reddit, including Night Mode and various options in Style Tweaks. I recommend taking a look here and enabling anything that looks interesting to you. Browsing – Change various browsing-oriented options, including keyboard navigation menus. Productivity – A few productivity settings. The defaults are fine; there’s not a lot to change here. Core – Toggle RES modules on and off, choose RES presets, open the Command Line, etc. Lots of interesting stuff here.
Closing Notes
RES is used by almost every Reddit user, but very few people actually dive into its settings and realize just how much you can change. My recommendation is browsing with RES for a little while before changing anything, then identifying on your own things that annoy you or could be better about it. Once you’ve done that, you can poke around in settings and change exactly what you’re looking for. Also, try out Night Mode. It’s pretty nice.
