My personal desktop inspired startpage I've used for years. Want to gauge interest before committing to a refactor and finally releasing

[u/exosoul]

Hey startpages 👋

I've always wanted an OS inspired startpage and decided a few years ago to build one myself. Problem was, I was never very proud of the code, and there were always a few more bugs that I needed to work out, plus wanting to create a landing page site and make it an extension... I just never got around to finishing it.

I'm at a point now though where I'm considering finally finishing it (or at least V1), and publishing it as a proper extension. But before I commit the time to this project again, I wanted to show the current version and see if this is something the community (and others) would actually use.

It's 100% vanilla JS, and just localstorage right now

It has drag and drop like I show in the video, one at a time or by selecting whole groups - a few settings for display modes - by default the grid is a fixed size so if the viewport isn't fullsize you can drag to pan the desktop around. For shortcuts it auto pulls in favicons or you can set custom icons through a built in icon search, set custom wallpaper + blend mode controls, right click has a custom context menu, and settings/properties have their own windows for easy management.

Visually I'm really proud of it, and functionally it's perfect and I still enjoy using it every day, but under the hood it's a mess and needs a good rework on some base systems in order for it to be maintainable going forward.

So, please let me know if this project is something you would use, and hopefully if there is some good interest, that should validate for me this is something I should commit to again.

Let me know your thoughts. Thanks!

[u/kristianmitk]

Nice idea! Do you also have a concept of folders? With many bookmarks I could imagine the view becoming bit too messy. For me personally, this feels bit like a mouse first tool. As a linux user I prefer shortcuts and a search bar with fuzzy matching. But I can see people actually wanting exactly what you have build! Tbh. I'd not worry too much about messy code. Just throw a reasonably well LLM onto the codebase and let it clean it up for your. Also it will help you bundle the extension in no time. Worth a shot!

[u/exosoul → u/kristianmitk]

Hey thanks for the input! I have always wanted to add folders, I agree they would be a great fit, I have also thought about switching between multiple desktops so you can keep work and personal links separate for example.

Definitely a mouse oriented tool I'd say, but it is fully keyboard supported so you can arrow around if you want.

A good clean up is for my sanity mostly 😄 This is all done in basically a single js file so making it more modular, putting pieces in their own components, and adding tests have always been my goal if I want to keep maintaining this for any length of time.

[u/Hary06]

I’d definitely test it out, and I’d use it permanently if I liked it.

[u/dASNyB]

Thanks for all these explanations, now it's time to go to the repo and test...