# Settings

The control centre for everything Panama owns. Anything the system owns —
hardware, accounts, printers — is delegated to GNOME Settings and labelled as
such rather than half-reimplemented.

## System Health

The stable internal `services` route renders **System Health**. It is reachable
from the Settings sidebar and its live 54px footer, the degraded-only bar
indicator, and Vicinae's **Panama: Check System Health** command. Healthy scans
reserve no bar space and produce no notification.

`services/Health.qml` owns the last accepted redacted snapshot. It invokes
`scripts/panama-doctor` for scans and bounded repairs, `wl-copy` only for an
explicit **Copy Report**, and bounded `notify-send` only when an external repair
fails. For a concise terminal view, run:

```bash
~/.config/quickshell/scripts/panama-doctor --summary
```

The helper diagnoses Panama-owned desktop services, dependencies, links, and
configured integrations. It does not read secret values, clipboard or
notification contents, calendar events, SSIDs, addresses, or arbitrary command
output. Its repair interface is an authored allow-list: it never installs a
package, runs `sudo`, deletes user data, or repairs a service Panama does not
own. A repair remains degraded until a fresh scan observes recovery.

The final card is the ownership boundary. Network configuration and the exact
Users, Sharing, Colour profiles, and Digital wellbeing handoffs open GNOME
Settings because Fedora's system services own those areas.

## Adding a setting

One schema entry. That is the whole job.

```qml
// config/PreferenceSchema.qml
{
    key: "blurSize", type: "int", def: 8, min: 1, max: 20, step: 1,
    unit: "px", group: "effects",
    label: "Blur radius",
    detail: "Larger is softer and costs more frame time",
    hypr: { path: ["decoration", "blur", "size"], option: "decoration:blur:size", readAs: "int" }
}
```

```qml
// the page
SliderRow { setting: "blurSize" }
```

Persistence, validation, clamping, reset, search indexing, and — with a `hypr`
block — live application to the compositor and the startup replay all derive
from that entry. There is nothing else to register.

If it is compositor-backed, add the matching `prefs.get("blurSize", 8)` in
`hypr/looks.lua` so the Hyprland config still stands alone with no settings
file.

## Setting ownership

Every preference has **one primary page**, derived from its schema `group` and
the route in `services/SettingsSearch.qml`. Search results always open that
owner. A control may appear on a second page only when the same adaptation is
part of another established mental model; otherwise use a labelled handoff to
the owner instead of duplicating it.

### Intentional mirrors

| Setting | Primary page | Mirror | Why the mirror earns its place |
|---|---|---|---|
| `animationsEnabled` | Appearance | Accessibility | Reduced motion belongs both to visual polish and motion accessibility. |
| `cursorInactiveTimeout` | Mouse | Accessibility | Pointer visibility is configured with pointer behaviour but affects motor and visual access. |
| `cursorSize` | Accessibility | Mouse | Large cursors are an accessibility adaptation that users also look for beside pointer controls. |
| `inactiveOpacity` | Appearance | Accessibility | Window translucency is an appearance choice with a direct readability impact. |
| `lockMinutes` | Power | Privacy | Idle timing owns the mechanism; privacy owns the expectation that the unattended desktop locks. |
| `lockOnSleep` | Power | Privacy | Suspend owns the transition; privacy owns whether waking requires authentication. |

Lock-screen visuals belong only to **Appearance**: background source, blur,
clock, date, user name, and password-field presentation. **Power** owns when
the session locks, while **Privacy** keeps only the established timing mirrors
above. Visual controls must not be copied onto either page.

**Displays** is the sole owner of mode, scale, rotation, arrangement, and primary role.
Those values form one safety transaction: every connected output
is applied, verified, confirmed, or restored together. Other pages may link to
Displays, but must never expose a second geometry control or persist a partial
layout.

Mirrors must remain the same schema-backed control, never a second preference
or a copied default. Additions to this table require a concrete discoverability
reason and an update to `tests/quickshell/settings-ownership-contract.sh`.

Window border colour follows the same ownership rule. The inactive border is a
**scheme-relative role** owned by `ColorScheme.qml`: it changes only to retain
neutral contrast in light and dark modes. The focused Prism border is the
accent role owned by the visual theme (and, eventually, an accent picker).
`ColorScheme.qml` must never write the focused border, so changing schemes
cannot erase a user-selected accent.

## The rows

| Component | For |
|---|---|
| `SettingsPage` | The page scaffold: title, lede, optional pinned `header` |
| `ToggleRow { setting }` | A boolean |
| `SliderRow { setting }` | A number; `zeroLabel` renders 0 as "Never"/"Instant"/"None" |
| `ChoiceRow { setting }` | An enum, as a segmented control |
| `ActionRow` | A button: opens a GNOME panel, runs a one-shot |
| `TextRow` | A genuinely read-only fact |

`TextRow` is for facts, not for settings that were merely expensive to wire.
Before Stage 3 more than half of all rows were static text standing in for
controls; that is the failure this vocabulary exists to prevent.

Rows write through `SystemSettings.commitPreference(key, value)`, which routes
compositor-backed keys through apply-and-verify and local keys straight to the
store. A row never needs to know which kind it holds.

## Things that will bite you

**`readAs` describes the answer, not the setting.** `hyprctl getoption` returns
the value in a different JSON field per type — `int`, `bool`, `float`, `str`,
and `css` for gaps (a four-value box). Declaring the wrong one does not fail
loudly: it makes every write to that key look *rejected*, and the user sees an
error for a change that worked. `tests/quickshell/schema-hypr-shape-contract.sh`
asks the compositor for the real shape of every mapped option.

**Never trust an exit code from `hyprctl`.** `keyword` refuses to work on a
Lua-configured Hyprland, prints the refusal to stdout, and exits 0. `eval` exits
0 on syntax and runtime errors too. The only trustworthy signal that a write
landed is reading the value back.

**The Settings window is tiled.** `implicitWidth` is a hint; the layout decides,
and it ranges from a half-screen split to the full display. `SliderRow` stacks
its control under the label below 520px. Test narrow.

**Binding an anchor to `undefined` does not reliably release it.** Switching
layouts that way left a slider anchored to both edges with the label squeezed
into what was left. Position explicitly instead.

**Inside a `SettingsCard`, `parent` is the card's internal Column.** So
`parent.modelData` in a nested `Repeater` is undefined and the rows silently
never appear — you get a card with a heading and nothing under it. Address the
outer model through an explicit `id`.

**A `TapHandler` declared as a child of `SettingRow` lands in the trailing
slot**, because that is the row's default property, so only the right-hand edge
becomes clickable. Use `activatable: true` with `onActivated` for a whole-row
target.

**A content-identical Quickshell entry can share the live shell's ID.**
Quickshell derives the Shell ID from config *content*, not path. Runtime
harnesses therefore create a distinct semantic entry file, address that exact
file with `qs -p`, and discover its PID from the exact Config path in
`qs list --all`. They terminate only that recorded PID with `kill`; never use
`qs kill` from a copied configuration.

## Where state lives

| File | Holds |
|---|---|
| `~/.config/panama/settings.json` | Everything in the schema. Read by the shell *and* by `hypr/prefs.lua` |
| `$XDG_STATE_HOME/panama/panama-home.json` | Home accessory favourites and aliases |
| `$XDG_STATE_HOME/panama/backups/` | Settings snapshots |
| `$XDG_STATE_HOME/panama/hypridle.conf` | Generated idle config |
| `$XDG_STATE_HOME/panama/hyprlock.conf` | Generated lock-screen appearance |

`SystemSettings.restoreDefaults()` spans all of them. A reset that silently
skipped one would be worse than having no reset, because nothing would say so.

## Not stored by Panama

Timezone and network time are read from and written to `timedatectl` directly.
They belong to the machine and are shared with sessions that never see Panama's
file; storing a copy would create a second answer to a question the system
already answers.
