Devlog 2 — “Building the Void”

Devlog 1 laid the foundation. This week was about turning ÆTHER OS into something that actually feels like an operating system: a real window manager, virtual filesystem, built-in apps, polish, shipping, and a bug-fixing marathon.

What I built

1. Window manager

The window manager now supports draggable titlebars, eight resize handles, edge and corner snapping, double-click maximize, triple-click zoom, minimize animations to the dock, close animations, and automatic z-order updates.

One of the biggest bugs came from installing a new mousemove listener every drag. After enough windows were opened and closed, stale listeners accumulated, dragging became unreliable, and buttons stopped responding. The fix was a single shared drag state with listeners installed once.

2. Virtual filesystem + desktop

The filesystem is stored as a JSON tree in localStorage (aether:fs).

The Terminal supports ls, cd, cat, mkdir, touch, mv, cp, rm, rename, and more.

The desktop renders /home/explorer as an icon grid with drag-and-drop, context menus, and File Explorer integration with folders, breadcrumbs, and direct file editing.

3. Apps

Built eight core apps:

Stellar Terminal — history, tab completion, neofetch, cowsay, warp, js, and more.
Prism Editor — minimap, tabs, find/replace, themes, and Ctrl+S filesystem saving.
Nebula Calc — scientific mode, DEG/RAD toggle, history, and expression rewriting.
Starlog — Markdown notes with live preview and auto-save.
Pulse Monitor — live CPU, Memory, Network, Disk, and GPU graphs.
System Core — wallpapers, accent colors, dock settings, sounds, and reset.
Cosmos Info — animated specs, uptime, and a hidden matrix-rain easter egg.
Shortcuts — keyboard shortcut reference.

4. Polish

Added custom scrollbars, purple selection, Inter + JetBrains Mono fonts, focused window glow, randomized boot typing, dock magnification, spring animations, notification toasts, and six synthesized Web Audio UI sounds.

5. First shipping attempt

After deploying to Vercel, I spent thirty minutes using the OS like a real user and found another wave of bugs.

The clock froze after unlock, the volume slider wasn’t wired, Ctrl+W closed the browser, the GPU chart was missing, the scientific calculator layout broke, maximized windows hid behind the menu bar, file opening crashed because of a template literal typo, and the window manager listener leak caused multiple unrelated issues.

The biggest lesson: fix the root cause, not every symptom.

6. Analytics

Integrated @vercel/analytics and @vercel/speed-insights to monitor production traffic and performance.

Bugs fixed

Thirty-five bugs spotted, including window snapping, Alt+Tab, filesystem edge cases, calculator fixes, audio leaks, notification cleanup, dock magnification, font loading, window manager listener leaks, frozen clock, GPU monitoring, wallpaper caching, Finder title sync, maximized window layout, and

The biggest fix was removing duplicated event listeners from the window manager, solving several seemingly unrelated bugs at once.

✦ breathe the void