Keywords and Websites

Keyword Blocker watches the address bar in your browser. The moment you land on a page whose URL contains a word you have blocked, Curbox steps in with a pause screen.

Supported Browsers

Keyword Blocker works in these browsers:

Google Chrome
Brave
Firefox
Fennec
Opera
Cromite
Vanadium (GrapheneOS)

also if you kinda pro, you can easily add support for a browser especially if its chromium or firefox based. Read CONTRIBUTING.md

Creating a Keyword Group

The Keyword Blocker screen showing an empty state with No keyword groups yet message and a + button in the corner Tap the + button to create your first keyword group.

Open Keyword Blocker Tap Reducers, then tap Keywords And Websites.
Tap the + button The + button is in the bottom right corner.
Enter a name Give your group a name, like “Social Media Sites” or “News.”
Add keywords Type the words or URL fragments you want to block. One keyword per entry. Scroll a few inches below on this page to learn how to write em properly.
Configure the warning screen (optional) Tap Configure Warning Screen to choose what happens when someone visits a blocked URL. See Unlock Challenges.
Save Tap Done. The group is active immediately.

How to Write Keywords

Keywords tell Curbox what websites or content to watch. When you visit something that matches a keyword, Curbox steps in based on the rules you set.

Here is everything you need to know to write keywords that actually work.

The simplest way: just type the website name

If you want to block a whole website, just type its domain.

youtube.com
reddit.com
twitter.com

That is it. Curbox will block the site no matter what page you are on.

You do not need to add https:// or www. — Curbox handles that for you.

Block a specific section of a website

Maybe you only want to block YouTube Shorts, not all of YouTube.

Type the domain plus the path:

youtube.com/shorts

Now only Shorts get blocked. Regular YouTube videos are still allowed.

More examples:

instagram.com/reels
reddit.com/r/gaming
facebook.com/reel

Block by path only (any website)

If you start a keyword with /, Curbox matches that path on any website.

/shorts
/reels
/reel

This blocks the /shorts path on YouTube, the /reels path on Instagram, and so on — all in one keyword.

Use wildcards for flexible matching

A * means “anything can go here.”

*.reddit.com

This matches old.reddit.com, www.reddit.com, m.reddit.com — any version of Reddit.

youtube.com/watch*

This matches any YouTube watch page, no matter what video ID comes after.

? works like * but matches exactly one character instead of many. You will rarely need this.

Block by a single word

If you type just a plain word with no dots or slashes, Curbox looks for it as a piece of the domain name.

youtube

This matches youtube.com, m.youtube.com, youtube.co.uk — anything with youtube as a domain segment.

Useful when a site has many regional versions.

Advanced: raw regex

If you know regular expressions, you can write one by starting the keyword with r:.

r:(?:shorts|reels|reel)

This matches any URL that contains the word shorts, reels, or reel anywhere in it.

Only use this if you are comfortable with regex. A typo will silently make the keyword do nothing.

Importing a list from a file

You can add many keywords at once by importing a .txt file.

The file should have one keyword per line:

youtube.com/shorts
instagram.com/reels
/reel
tiktok.com

Blank lines are ignored. Duplicates are skipped automatically.

To import, open the keyword group, tap the three dot menu at the top, and choose Import.

Common mistakes

Adding https:// or www. You do not need these. youtube.com works the same as https://www.youtube.com.

Being too broad com as a keyword would try to match every .com site. Keep keywords specific to what you actually want to block.

Being too specific youtube.com/shorts?v=abc123xyz only blocks that one exact video. Use youtube.com/shorts instead to block all Shorts.

Typos in regex If a keyword starts with r: and has a syntax error, it gets skipped silently. Test your regex before adding it.

Quick reference

What you want	What to type
Block a whole site	`youtube.com`
Block one section	`youtube.com/shorts`
Block a path on any site	`/shorts`
Block all subdomains	`*.youtube.com`
Block by domain word	`youtube`
Advanced match	`r:shorts\|reels`