Been a while since I have actually went back to the development of my beloved startpage but it's finally gotten a fresh release with a few new features.

It's ironical how I use startpage everyday that I open my browser and yet I hardly go back to adding new features. I would like to defend myself at this point by pointing out that startpage is pretty stable as it is and even without new features, it works pretty solid.

TL;DR: New version of startpage supports quicklinks, custom title and shows version. Get it from here

The backstory

So few days ago I was scrolling through r/unixporn and came across a post of a startpage. It looked pretty so I decided to look into it. I absolutely loved the way it looked. I was one step away from replacing my current startpage with that one, actually two steps. I like startpage quite a lot but tilde is worth a shot. Had it not been my lack of time to try out new things, I would totally like to take tilde for a spin.

Anyway, tilde actually introduced a pretty nice feature. It had some nice shortcut settings, for eg: if you type r/r/unixporn, it opens unixporn and typing g'ytmdl will search for ytmdl on GitHub. Kudos to the dev for actually coming up with such a nice idea. Anyhow, I thought, how about we have such a feature on startpage with a step ahead (we support configuration!).

There goes the story of I finally getting back to startpage and as of writing this post, this feature is available on startpage, along with some other new features.

What did you add in this release?

Three major things were added on startpage in this release:

• Support for quicklinks (startpage version of shortcuts from Tilde)
• Support to set a custom window title from the config
• Support for showing version info on the settings page

QuickLinks

So the idea is pretty neat and useful (as I already rambled about it in the above paragraph). Users can defined quicklinks from the config in the following way:

quickLinks: {
    "g": "https://github.com"
}

Above will mean g'ytmdl will resolve to https://github.com/search?q=ytmdl and g/deepjyoti30 will resolve to https://github.com/deepjyoti30.

By default for searching the endpoint is set as /search?q=

The search endpoint can be changed on a per object basis in the following way:

quickLinks: {
    "g": {
      "URL": "https://github.com",
      "Search": "/search?q="
    }
}

By default, the following definitions are provided by startpage:

• y: Youtube
• g: GitHub
• r: Reddit

You can always add more quicklinks according to your wish, just open startpage and click ctrl+, or type --setting on the search bar ;-}

Following is a quick example of the above feature in action:

Custom title

As requested by @mohkale on this issue, the title of the window was set to startpage by default. However, now users can change it by adding a title field in the config. This can be set to anything!

Version on Settings

This has been in my mind since a while. It's always good to let the user know which version of the app they have installed. This is also useful for reporting issues where the user can just mention the version they are using.

From v0.4, a version will be displayed in the settings modal at the top.

Where to get it?

As usual, it is available on GitHub here. It is suggested to get a solid version and not user the branch directly. Installation instructions are available in the wiki here and configuration instructions can be found here