ok so this is my webos mission entry. theme is basically “what if a hacker terminal and a desktop os had a baby” - black and white everything, one accent color (ember orange), monospace fonts, the works. no frameworks, just html/css/js because i wanted to actually understand every line of this thing.

got the core stuff working:

window manager - you can drag windows around, focus them (the active one gets a glowy orange outline, felt very “hacker movie” to me), minimize to the taskbar, close them. double click an icon and it spawns a new window, slightly offset so they don’t all stack exactly on top of each other.

apps - went with 5:

• a terminal you can actually type into (help, whoami, ls, etc, plus a hidden crow command that prints an ascii bird because why not)
• a fake file explorer with a little folder tree (there’s a secrets.txt in there, very serious business)
• an “about” app that’s basically neofetch but for my os, shows uptime and stuff
• a notes app that saves to localStorage so your notes survive a refresh
• a music player with a little audio visualizer using the web audio api - this one took way longer than expected

the boot sequence - probably my favorite part. when you load the page you get a fake terminal boot log scrolling by ([ ok ] mounting //embercrow/root… type stuff), then this big ascii bird silhouette fades in with a glowing orange eye, then a fake login prompt types itself out and “logs you in” (no actual password, it’s all for show), then it does a crt scanline transition into the desktop. you can skip it by pressing any key if you don’t want to sit through it every time.

the mascot is “the embercrow” - giant bird of prey made out of dots/ascii blocks with one glowing eye. shows up in the boot sequence and as a little taskbar icon.

architecture-wise i kept the window manager totally dumb/generic - it doesn’t know anything about specific apps, each app just registers itself with a title, icon, and a function that builds its content. made it way easier to build each app on its own and test it in isolation.

todo

mostly polish at this point - tweaking the boot sequence timing, maybe a couple more terminal easter eggs. core stuff is done and working.