Desktop & Dock becomes Shell — Bar, Dock, Control Center, Tiling,
Workspaces — the home for everything Quickshell draws. The settings-
management cluster moves to System as Sync & Backup, Appearance's
Shell tab dissolves, and 24-hour time finally lives on Date & Time,
which always owned it.
The bar gets what it never had: a way to survive the wallpaper. A
second neutral text family (follow theme, or forced light or dark),
a one-layer shadow under every glyph, and a gradient scrim for
wallpapers nothing else survives — all off by default, pixel-identical
until asked. Widgets earn toggles (weather, media, clipboard, calendar
countdown), the vitals cluster stops leaving a dead pill behind, and
Control Center's sections learn to step aside.
The dock graduates from MVP: a context menu with window rows, pin,
unpin, quit and new-window; scroll an icon to cycle its windows; drag
to reorder on the dock itself; hover previews with one-shot captures;
and "Add App to Dock" in the launcher. Three real bugs died en route —
menus that slid away with the autohide, a readonly-property crash on
every menu open, and a drag that drifted half a slot per icon on side
docks. The pinned-apps editor in Settings becomes a drag strip.
166 contracts; the full suite is green except two live display and
switcher tests that cannot run behind a locked session — re-verified
on unlock.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
Quickshell segfaulted mid-session -- a Qt image-teardown bug, three cores in
the journal -- and the desktop stayed bar-less until a person noticed and
knew what to type, because the shell ran as a bare compositor child and
panama-crash-watch's report had no notification server left to arrive on.
The shell is now panama-quickshell.service, started per-session by
autostart.lua like every other Panama unit and never enabled globally:
Restart=on-failure turns the same crash into a two-second flicker, verified
by sending the running shell a real SIGSEGV and watching it return, and the
crash report now lands because the restarted shell is serving the bus by the
time the watcher looks. The two contracts that restart the shell learned to
do it through the unit, or the unit's own restart races them with a second
shell.
Recordings can hear: a recorderAudio preference -- none by default, GNOME's
default too, because a screencast that silently captured the microphone is an
incident -- adds system audio or the microphone through PulseAudio's
@DEFAULT_*@ aliases, so the capture follows whatever device Sound settings
has chosen.
The bar shows the active keyboard layout whenever more than one is
configured, mapped from xkb's own registry (evdev.lst) because deriving a
code from a description guesses wrong immediately -- "German" is de, not ge
-- and updated live from Hyprland's activelayout event. One layout, no
indicator, which is GNOME's behavior too.
And presentation mode: Caffeine plus Do Not Disturb as one quick-settings
tile, restoring both exactly as found -- the half you forget to arm before
plugging into a projector is the one that fires a message preview onto the
big screen.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
Three surfaces the first laptop install showed were missing.
The bar's battery icon gets an optional exact number beside it -- GNOME's
"Show Battery Percentage", off by default for GNOME's reason, one color with
the icon so it reads as one indicator.
The Power page says what closing the lid does. The policy already existed
(LidPolicy holds a suspend inhibitor while an external display is connected)
but was surfaced nowhere, so the machine's most physical behavior was
undiscoverable -- and the deliberate absence of an override deserves stating
rather than leaving someone to hunt for a switch that does not exist.
And the Users page grows a Fingerprint card, because fingerprint login is two
systems that fail silently when they disagree: fprintd holds the enrolled
prints, authselect decides whether PAM ever asks the reader. This machine
arrived with a finger enrolled from its GNOME days and with-fingerprint off,
which reads as "the reader is broken". The card shows both facts, flips the
authselect feature through polkit with a stated reason, and hands enrollment
to GNOME's Users panel, which owns the only good capture dialog -- a named
exception in the handoff contract. Everything through scripts/panama-fingerprint,
pinned by a stub-driven contract.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
Turning on a WireGuard profile whose server was unreachable used to cost the
whole network stack, and the only way out was nmcli typed into a terminal.
Quickshell's Networking module has no VPN surface, so this arrives as the one
sanctioned nmcli exception: a helper that lists, raises and lowers profiles,
a service that watches NetworkManager for changes made anywhere, a quick
settings tile (left-click toggles the most recently used profile, right-click
picks among them), and a bar glyph while a tunnel is up.
The safety property is in the helper, where it cannot be skipped: activation
waits a bounded 25 seconds, and a failure is rolled back down and reported
instead of leaving a black-hole default route. The contract pins exactly that,
against a stateful stub NetworkManager.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
Panama had no idea whether it was running on a laptop. No upower, no
battery, no lid, no AC: hypridle.conf says "This is a desktop" in its
own header, and that was true of the code as well as the machine.
panama-hw answers hardware questions one at a time, exits 0 or 1, and
prints nothing, so scripts, services and contracts all ask the same
way. The definition the rest of the laptop work hangs on is one line:
clamshell is lid-closed AND an external monitor. A machine with no
mains supply at all reports as being on wall power, because a desktop
cannot run out of it.
The battery service follows Vitals: sysfs through FileView, an
availability flag, and no subprocess on the timer. Globbing is the one
thing QML cannot do -- a battery is BAT0 or BAT1 or CMB0, mains is AC
or ADP1 or ACAD -- so panama-battery resolves the names once and the
shell reads the files directly after. Nothing falls back to a
plausible zero: a desktop shows no indicator, no card, and no charge
limit control where the firmware has no ceiling.
Also repairs two contracts that were already failing and had not been
noticed, because only the full suite runs them. The dependency
scanner treated line-initial variable assignments, case labels,
comments and heredoc bodies as commands, and `count`, `host`, `cancel`
and `import` are all real binaries on Fedora, so `command -v` could
not filter them out. It now drops comments and heredoc bodies and
requires a command to be followed by whitespace. Verified it still
catches a genuinely undeclared dependency rather than passing quietly.
The launcher command contract had not been told about the fourteen
commands added earlier today.
colour -> color, behaviour -> behavior, centre -> center, favourite ->
favorite, and about twenty other pairs, applied consistently across
comments, docs, error/UI copy, and a handful of QML identifiers that
used the British spelling as their actual name: SystemSettings'
serialiseValue/serialiseTable/normaliseGradient, Displays'
normaliseModes, Wallpaper's normalisePolicy, SettingsBackup's
serialiseHomeState, DateTime's ntpSynchronised property, Clipboard's
_normalise helper, and ShortcutCapture's cancelled signal (with its
onCancelled handler in ShortcutsPage.qml). Every call site and the two
tests that assert on the literal source text (settings-ownership and
settings-backup-live contracts) were updated in lockstep.
Left untouched: config/dot/espanso/match/packages/misspell-en/ is a
vendored third-party autocorrect dictionary -- its entries are typo
corrections, not our prose, and rewriting them would fight the
package's own purpose (and any future re-sync from upstream).
The already-American `favorites` property (Home page pinned
accessories) was never actually misspelled -- only nearby comments and
error strings said "favourites" -- so no data migration was needed
there.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E6TJUAh41HaP25MVHWkhRZ
Four places in the entire shell could reach Settings. The bar, where a
person looks first, was not one of them -- and Pill has routed
right-click to a secondaryActivated signal all along, which nothing
connected, so the gesture did nothing on every widget in the bar.
Each widget now opens the page that owns its settings: the clock and the
calendar reminder open Date & Time, weather opens Home, the vitals
readout opens Appearance, the status glyphs open Network & Devices, the
media readout opens Sound, and the privacy indicator opens Privacy &
Security. Left-click behaviour is untouched.
Two routing bugs found while picking those destinations, both of the
same kind and both invisible from the code, since each page reads
perfectly well on its own:
weather routed to Appearance while every weather control lives on
Home, so searching "temperature unit" opened a page without it.
vitals routed to Appearance, but the refresh interval sat on Home
while the toggles it governs sat on Appearance -- one concept split
across two pages, which is exactly what the ownership rule forbids.
The interval now sits beside the toggles and Home's stub card is gone.
The jump contract guards the failure mode these share. openSettings()
falls back to Home for an unknown page, sensibly and completely
silently, so a typo or a later rename turns a right-click into "opens
the wrong page" with nothing logged. It also fails a Pill-based bar
widget that leaves right-click unconnected, since that is how the
gesture came to be inert everywhere in the first place.
A third instance of the routing bug is still open: followMouse and
pointerSensitivity sit in the input group, which routes to Keyboard,
while both render on Mouse. Fixing it is a two-line group change in
PreferenceSchema.qml, which codex currently owns, so the contract that
catches all three lands with that fix rather than red.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown