Give the desktop real themes, video wallpapers, and honest titlebars

Appearance now opens on Themes: light and dark side by side, each
remembering its own choice, over galleries of ten shipped themes —
Tokyo Moon and Day joined by Moon Rose, Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox and
Everforest in both modes. A theme is a complete palette: the catalog
lives in themes.json, Theme.qml reads every color token from the
active record, and one render pipeline carries it to kitty, tmux,
btop, GTK, Vicinae, Firefox's chrome, and the lock screen. The Theme
editor builds new ones from four wells — wheel, hex, or eyedropper —
with derived surfaces, a saturation slider, debounced fine-tune, and
effects that save with the theme. Custom edits finally keep GNOME's
accent, kitty's border, and hyprlock in sync.

Wallpapers can be video: mpvpaper per output, hardware-decoded, muted
and looped, supervised and respawned. Panama owns the pausing — games,
battery, and a bar pill for right now — because the compositor
rebuilds full-screen blur for every frame a video wallpaper draws.
The lock screen gets a still frame.

Titlebars stop lying. GNOME apps get close-only on your chosen side,
the maximize and double-click settings are gone, the Settings window
obeys the same rules, and its titlebar can be turned off entirely.
Typography becomes five labeled dropdowns instead of a wall of
samples.

Contracts updated and written throughout (165 now); per the redesign
workflow none were executed — the full sweep runs once at the end.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
This commit is contained in:
Gabriel Brown
2026-08-23 23:39:04 -04:00
parent 7578348db1
commit cb7c09d208
68 changed files with 6115 additions and 1138 deletions
@@ -20,11 +20,49 @@ to change you can type it and never touch the sidebar.
## Appearance
Panama ships Tokyo Night Moon in a light and a dark variant, with eight
accent colours. Changing either repaints the shell, the terminal, GTK
applications, the lock screen and the system monitor at once.
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.
The wallpaper is per-monitor if you want it to be.
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.
## Applications