# Making it yours

## Settings

`Super + I`. Fourteen categories down the side, covering appearance, displays,
sound, input, network, power, accounts and the rest. A category with more than
one subject in it opens a row of tabs above the page, which is where the
narrower topics live: Printers is a tab of Network & Sharing, Dictation a tab
of Input, and About, Software Update, Storage, Snapshots, Sync & Backup and
this manual are tabs of System.

Home is the first of them, and the page `Super + I` lands on. Its Overview tab
is the one you already know; My Home lists your Home Assistant lights by room
alongside the accessories Control Center shows, and Phone holds the iPhone
handoffs — battery, ring it, send it the clipboard or a file, and Messages.

The search box at the top searches the settings themselves rather than page
names, and each result says where it will land, so if you know what you want
to change you can type it and never touch the sidebar.

## Appearance

The Appearance page opens on **Themes**. At the top are light and dark, side by
side, each showing the theme it will land on; below them are two galleries —
six dark themes and four light ones, including Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox and
Everforest alongside Panama's own Tokyo Night Moon and Day.

Light and dark remember separately. Pick Everforest for the dark side and
Catppuccin Latte for the light one, and flipping between them lands on each
rather than resetting to the shipped pair.

Choosing a theme repaints the shell, the terminal, GTK applications, the lock
screen and the system monitor at once — not just the shell's own windows.

### Build your own

The **Theme editor** tab is four colours: primary, secondary, background and
foreground. Each has a swatch, a hex field you can type into, a colour wheel
and an eyedropper for sampling anything on screen. Background and foreground
are not single colours — the panels, popovers, dividers and dimmed text are all
mixed from them, so moving the background moves the whole family with it.

Under that, a saturation slider for the whole palette at once, a fine-tune for
the exact hue of each end of the accent, and the effects — corners, blur,
shadows, glow and motion. Save it with a name and it appears in the galleries
above beside the shipped ones, effects included. Editing a shipped theme does
not damage it: it makes you a copy.

### Wallpapers

The wallpaper is per-monitor if you want it to be, and it can be a video.

Videos loop muted and decode on the GPU. They pause themselves while a game is
running, and on battery unless you say otherwise; while one is playing a pill
appears in the bar, and clicking it pauses immediately — for a call, a
recording, or just quiet. The lock screen shows a still frame from the video,
because it cannot play motion.

### Titlebars

There is no minimize button, on Panama's windows or on GNOME applications.
Hyprland has no minimize, so the button would do nothing; maximize means very
little in a tiler. You get close, on whichever side you prefer. Panama's own
titlebar can be turned off entirely, which leaves the Settings window bare:
`Super + Q` closes it, `Super + drag` moves it, `Escape` still works.

## Shell

Everything Panama draws on the screen has a tab under **Shell**: the bar, the
dock, Control Center, tiling and workspaces. Appearance decides the colours;
this decides what is there at all.

### The bar

The bar has no background of its own — it floats on your wallpaper. That is
fine over most images and hopeless over a few, so the **Bar** tab opens on the
three controls that fix it. **Bar text** follows your theme by default, or you
can force it light or dark for the wallpaper you actually use. **Bar text
shadow** puts a soft halo under every glyph at once. **Bar backdrop** fades a
thin scrim down from the top edge. All three land on the real bar above the
window as you change them, so you can watch rather than guess.

Under that, one switch per widget: weather, media, the clipboard button, the
calendar countdown, processor, memory, graphics, battery and agent usage. A
switch only ever removes something — turning weather on does not make a
forecast appear before one has been fetched. The indicators that come and go on
their own — system health, microphone and camera, focus, a paused video
wallpaper — have no switches, because they are already absent whenever they
have nothing to say.

Seconds and the weekday are here too. **24-hour time** is not: it also changes
the date menu, your notification timestamps and the lock screen, so it lives on
System › Date & Time with the rest of the clock.

### The dock

**Pinned applications** shows the dock as the dock shows it. Drag an icon to
move it, hover one for the × that unpins it, and search underneath to add
something. The order here is the order on screen.

The dock itself takes the same gestures now. Drag an icon along the dock to
reorder it without opening Settings at all. Right-click one for its menu: every
open window of that application listed by title, whatever shortcuts the
application itself offers, then a new window, pin or unpin, quit, and **Dock
settings** if you want the rest. Scroll on an icon to step through that
application's windows. Hover one that has windows open and a preview of each
appears after a moment.

For pinning something that is not running, the launcher has **Add App to
Dock** — type it into `Super + Space`, pick the application, done.

### Control Center

The panel that opens from the status cluster at the right of the bar. The
**Control Center** tab turns its sections on and off: Focus, Home and Phone.
Hiding one only hides it from the panel; the settings page behind it still
works.

### Tiling and workspaces

The last two tabs hold what used to be spread across the old Desktop page.
**Tiling** is the window layout, the master area, gaps and window edges, and
the Hyprland notices Panama keeps quiet. **Workspaces** is the workspace
behaviour, how long a focus session runs, and your saved projects.

## Carrying settings between machines

System › **Sync & Backup**. Export writes your settings to a file; importing
one shows you exactly what would change before anything does, and you decide
then. Below it, **Settings backups** keeps dated copies you can restore from —
these are your settings, not btrfs Snapshots, which is a different tab and
covers the whole filesystem. **Restore defaults** is at the bottom: it resets
appearance, dock, clock, focus and display policy and clears your Home
accessory arrangement, and leaves your pinned applications, files and paired
devices alone.

## Applications

`panama apps` in a terminal offers the optional application categories the
installer asked about, so a machine can acquire Slack in March without having
wanted Discord in January.

`panama app` builds the handful of applications no repository carries. It is
deliberately not part of installing, because a source build is slow and
depends on an upstream that moves.

## Autostart and defaults

The Applications settings page controls which application opens which kind of
file, and what starts when you log in.

## Going further

The compositor is configured in Lua under `~/.config/hypr`, and every file
there explains what it does and why. `overrides.lua` is loaded last and is
the intended place for per-machine changes, so you can adjust anything
without editing a file the repository will update.

The shell is QML under `~/.config/quickshell`. Both directories are symlinks
into the Panama repository, so an edit is a change to your checkout and
`panama update` will offer to commit it.
