8h 9m logged

Devlog 4 - The Start Menu Ate My Week

I js wanted to give the start menu some real attention instead of leaving it as a sad little list forever. I did NOT expect that to become the biggest sprint of the whole project but here we are… Built a proper pin/unpin system. My first version was a bit problematic so I sat with it for a while then rebuilt it the right way with an actual right-click context menu and everything. It felt genuinely satisfying once it finally clicked. Then I somehow convinced myself to add six more features to give the start menu a new life: greeting header, search bar, pinned grid, recent activity, system widgets and a whole user profile footer. Small moments of panic…? Definitely.. then I broke it into phases so I didn’t drown trying to build an entire desktop in one sitting.

What nobody tells you about “just redesign the start menu” is how many times you’ll open the same file and stare at the same fifteen lines wondering why they look right and behave wrong. Trial and error ate most of my time which is fair enough. I also gave every icon its own little color badge, wired up a real “/” keyboard shortcut to match the hint I’d put in the search bar then made the whole thing Tab-and-Enter navigable since none of it was there before. Every “small fix” somehow turned into reopening three different files and rechecking things I was already convinced were correct which… more often than not, they weren’t. But that part actually felt rewarding. Little by little, the menu finally started feeling alive.

And then, the bugs… I found out my own Start button was secretly broken, well… not heartbroken like me, at least. Clicking it did nothing at all because an old line of code was quietly fighting a newer one inside the same click handler. THAT took way TOO long to spot. The sneakiest ones weren’t even logic bugs.. a single missing dash in a CSS variable. A class name one word off from the real HTML. Completely invisible unless you go hunting line by line, just quietly doing nothing the whole time.

The JavaScript is by far the most nerve-wracking, head-splitting experience ever. Absolute horror. I don’t wanna touch that file ever again. My eyes are bloodshot. The amount of time I spent just staring at the code, hunting down errors one by one is honestly concerning..

The menu actually works now, start to finish. Search, pinning, keyboard navigation and all. It cost way more blood than a start menu has any right to. Genuinely proud of this one precisely because of how much it fought back. Terminal’s turn next. And it should be VERY afraid.

Note: Snuck localStorage into the project too! Turns out users generally prefer their settings, notes and pinned apps to exist for longer than five seconds. Weird bunch.