Nickelmenu & plato for kobo: customize your kobo beyond the defaults

The stock Kobo software is fine. It reads books. But after a few months with my Libra, I started wanting more — a faster way to toggle WiFi, the ability to take screenshots, and a PDF reader that didn’t feel like wading through molasses. That’s where NickelMenu and Plato come in, and honestly, they’ve transformed how I use the device.

NickelMenu is the gateway drug. It’s a tiny utility that adds custom menu entries to Kobo’s native interface — no jailbreak, no system file hacking. Installation is shockingly easy: download the one-click installer package from GitHub, copy the KoboRoot.tgz file to the .kobo folder on your device over USB, and eject. The Kobo sees the file on boot and installs everything automatically. Thirty seconds later, you’ve got a new “NickelMenu” section in your settings.

The magic happens in the config file. Create a plain text file at .adds/nm/config on your Kobo, and each line defines a menu entry. The syntax is simple: menu_item :location :label :action :argument. A few of the entries I actually use every day:

menu_item :main    :Toggle WiFi      :nickel_wifi     :toggle
menu_item :reader  :Dark Mode        :nickel_misc     :night_mode
menu_item :reader  :Screenshot       :nickel_screenshot
menu_item :main    :Battery %        :nickel_batt

Toggling WiFi from the home screen instead of digging through three layers of settings saves me maybe ten seconds a day, but it adds up. The screenshot action has been genuinely useful for capturing book passages to share. And the dark mode toggle in the reader menu means I can switch to white-on-black reading without ever leaving my book.

Plato is the other half of the equation. It’s a standalone document reader — much lighter than Kobo’s native reader, and dramatically faster for PDFs. If you read academic papers or scanned documents, the stock reader is painful: page turns lag, zooming is clunky, and reflow is basically nonexistent. Plato handles all of that smoothly. It boots in about three seconds instead of Kobo’s fifteen, and PDF page turns are near-instant.

To install Plato, download it from GitHub, extract it to .adds/plato/ on your device, then add this to your NickelMenu config:

menu_item :main :Plato :nickel_extras :plato

Now you can launch Plato directly from your home screen menu. When you close Plato, it drops you back into Nickel — no rebooting, no juggling. I keep my academic reading in Plato and my pleasure reading in the stock reader. Best of both worlds.

One heads-up: Plato doesn’t support every Kobo model. Check the GitHub compatibility list before installing. But if your device is supported, it’s a no-brainer upgrade for anyone who handles PDFs.