One hub for topics, your library, and the dictionary

One place to look instead of five tabs

Novus Learn spreads useful work across several surfaces: Wikipedia search, My Library, the dictionary, site indexing, paper study, uploads, and the rest of the app routes. That breadth is intentional, but it can make a simple question — “where was that claim?” or “what does this term mean?” — feel like a scavenger hunt. The Hub closes that gap. Open it with ⌘K on macOS or Ctrl-K on Windows and Linux, or press / when focus is not already in a text field, and type. One ranked list answers across sources instead of forcing you to guess which page to open first.

The Hub is not a separate product mode and it does not invent a new search corpus. It is a keyboard-first overlay that reuses the same Wikipedia search API, the same on-device library index, and the same dictionary route you already use elsewhere. Closing it returns focus to whatever triggered it, so interrupting a study session costs almost nothing.

That design matters for a local-first app. Remote tools often centralise everything behind an account timeline. Novus Learn keeps projects on your device and still gives you a fast way to jump between a public topic, a saved page, a dictionary definition, and a tool route without leaving the current browser profile.

What a query can return

Results arrive in labelled groups so you can see where each hit came from. With an empty query, the Hub shows recent local projects and the common navigation targets — search, dictionary, read a page, index a site, study a paper, break down a video or textbook, upload a document, and more. As soon as you type at least two characters, the list rebuilds around that query.

Local library hits come from a full-text index over titles, concepts, sections, and claim evidence stored in IndexedDB. Matching projects open at `/project/…`. When a passage inside a project matches, the Hub also surfaces clipped evidence rows under “In your pages,” deep-linked to the exact evidence anchor on the Sources view. Wikipedia topic hits use the live Wikimedia search endpoint and open the normal topic path for that page. Short one- or two-word queries can additionally offer a dictionary action that lands on `/dictionary?q=…`.

• My library: recent projects when idle; content-ranked projects once you type.
• In your pages: verbatim passage snippets deep-linked to claim evidence.
• Topics · Wikipedia: live public search results with titles and descriptions.
• Dictionary: a define action for short terms, below topic and library results.
• Go to: filtered app destinations when the query matches a tool or page name.

Commands while you are already on a topic

If the page you are viewing is a Wikipedia topic or a local project, the Hub also recognises a small set of study commands. Phrases such as “open the quiz” or “download the flashcards” resolve against the current topic or project base path and jump straight to the matching section — the same command language used in Ask, exposed here as a keyboard shortcut rather than a chatbot reply.

Those command rows are intentionally narrow. They only appear when there is a current topic or project to act on, and only for verbs the app can execute locally: opening a section or taking you to the place where an export already lives. Unsupported phrasing falls through to ordinary search instead of inventing a confident action.

The separation is useful. Ask answers questions with source claims. The Hub navigates. Keeping those jobs distinct means a mistyped command does not produce a fabricated answer, and a search for a library passage does not pretend to be generative chat.

Privacy boundaries the Hub respects

Typing in the Hub is not the same as uploading your library to a Novus Learn account. There is still no account. Local project and passage search runs entirely in the browser against IndexedDB. Wikipedia search and dictionary lookups use the public endpoints those tools already call; your private uploads and site projects are not sent along as context for those requests.

Because the library half is device-local, the Hub on another browser or profile will not magically see the same projects. That is the same privacy trade-off as My Library itself: fast local retrieval in exchange for no cloud sync. Clearing site data removes the index with everything else.

Result badges stay honest about origin. A web-page project shows its host. A Wikipedia topic is labelled as a topic. A passage row quotes clipped source text rather than a rewritten summary. The Hub ranks and routes; it does not paraphrase your notes into a new claim.

A practical rhythm for everyday study

Use the Hub when you know what you want but not which surface owns it. Looking for a sentence from a documentation site you indexed earlier? Type a distinctive phrase and open the passage hit. Need a public overview before deepening a local project? Jump to the Wikipedia topic from the same list. Stuck on a term mid-lesson? Define it without abandoning the project tab underneath.

Keyboard navigation matches the rest of the overlay: arrow keys move the highlight, Enter opens the active row, Escape closes. On small screens the same stream appears as a bottom sheet, so the workflow is not desktop-only. Because the Hub mounts only while open, each session starts with a clean query and freshly loaded local projects.

The Hub will not replace careful reading, Ask for evidence-backed questions, or My Library for deliberate curation. It does one job that those tools do not: collapse discovery across public topics, private projects, definitions, and routes into a single, labelled stream you can drive without lifting your hands from the keyboard.