Devlog 5 & 5.5

This update started with a small annoyance and somehow turned into AstroPinax getting its own command system.
The first problem was the search bar. Some new tab redirect extensions would steal focus and leave the cursor in the browser’s address bar instead. Not anymore. I ended up brute-forcing it by repeatedly refocusing the search box after the page loads. It’s not glamorous, but it works every time. I also redesigned the date controls. Instead of having separate icons and text scattered around the header, there’s now a single date widget that looks cleaner and opens the date picker with one click. Searches also stay in the same tab now, which feels much more natural for a new tab page. The biggest addition though is Command Mode. If you start your search with >, the search bar transforms into a little terminal and starts suggesting commands as you type. You can move through them with the arrow keys and hit Enter to run them. Right now it supports things like:

today to jump back to today’s APOD.
random for a random day in NASA’s archive.
theme to switch themes.
nasa to open the official APOD website.

Once I had that working, I couldn’t stop adding to it. Typing / now turns the search bar blue and lets you search specific websites directly. Instead of Googling everything first, you can go straight where you want.

/github react searches GitHub.
/reddit linux searches Reddit.
/youtube jazz opens YouTube results.

There are also commands for DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia, with more on the way. I also added >help, which temporarily replaces the APOD panel with a built-in command guide, so you don’t have to remember everything. And if anyone’s curious how AstroPinax works, >source takes you straight to the repository. This project started as “show me NASA’s photo of the day. “Now it’s slowly turning into a keyboard-first browser homepage that just happens to have NASA built into it.