WA Desk Helper — Privacy, Notes & Reminders for WA Web

About

WA Desk Helper is a little toolkit I built because I spend way too much time on WhatsApp Web and kept wishing it had a few extra features. Nothing crazy — just stuff that makes the daily grind a bit easier.

Let me break down what it actually does:

Privacy Blur — This is the main thing. You know when you're screensharing or just have WhatsApp open in a coffee shop and someone walks by? You can blur names, messages, media, the sidebar, or the whole chat list independently. Each toggle is separate so you can blur just the names but still read the messages, or blur everything when you're sharing your screen. Hover over anything to reveal it — that's a toggle too. There's also a Panic button that blurs everything instantly (you can set a keyboard shortcut for it).

Spacious Mode — This one's personal. I felt like WhatsApp Web is way too cramped. Toggle this on and you get a wider chat area with more breathing room. There's also a resizer so you can drag the sidebar to exactly the width you want. It remembers your preference between sessions.

Hide Sidebar — Sometimes you just want to focus on one conversation without the list of chats staring at you. One click and it's gone. Click again and it's back.

Export Your Chats — This was the most requested thing from my friends. It exports the current conversation as a ZIP file containing a clean HTML file (looks nice, reads well), a CSV (for spreadsheets), and all the media images. Just pick a chat and hit Export ZIP. No scraping whole accounts or anything — just the chat you're currently looking at.

Labels — Tag your chats with labels like "Lead", "Client", "Urgent", "Waiting", "Paid", "Family", or add your own custom labels. They sync across sessions. Good for keeping track of who's who when you have a million chats.

Private Notes — Each chat gets its own private notepad. Write whatever you want — context about the person, reminders about what you discussed, inside jokes, whatever. Only you see these.

Reminders — Set a reminder for any chat with a title and a due date. It'll go off as a Chrome notification at the right time. Handy for "Reply to this after lunch" moments.

Templates — Got messages you type over and over? Save them as templates with a title and optional category. Click to insert them right into the message box. Saves a ton of typing.

Focus Mode — Hides unread counts and dims group chats so you can actually focus on what matters. Good for ADHD brains like mine.

Everything is local-first. Your notes, labels, reminders, templates — they all live in Chrome's storage on your machine. Nothing gets sent to any server. No accounts to create, no sign-ups, no data collection.

Oh and the obvious disclaimer: this isn't affiliated with WhatsApp or Meta in any way. It's just a browser extension that sits on top of WhatsApp Web and adds some QoL features. It can't send messages automatically, it doesn't scrape your contacts, it doesn't read your chats in the background — it only does things when you explicitly ask it to.

If you run into issues or have suggestions, feel free to leave a review or reach out on GitHub. I actually read that stuff and try to fix things.