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
Three things that were parked, and the reasons they were parked turned out to be
the useful part of doing them.
The Dock can sit on the left or the right as well as the bottom. Everything that
assumed the bottom edge is now asked which edge it is on: the anchors, the axis
that gets an implicit size, the sliver of input region that survives hiding, the
direction the body slides away in, and which side a tooltip opens towards. The
body was a Row and is a Grid, because one declaration then serves both
orientations -- Row and Column would each need their own children, and the
cross-axis anchors that centre items in a Row are the wrong axis in a Column.
Bottom is unchanged in every particular, and the settings default to it, so a
hot reload in the middle of this work left the running dock exactly where it
was.
One bug worth recording because static review would never have found it: a dock
spans the edge it lives on, which means anchoring BOTH ends of that edge. The
first side dock anchored top and left only, was free to collapse to its implicit
height, and came out one pixel tall. It parsed, it loaded, and it rendered
nothing. The contract measures the geometry rather than reading the source for
that reason, and was verified by putting the single-ended anchor back.
Per-screen is a list of names where empty means every screen, because a list is
what goes stale when a display is unplugged and "all" should not be spelled as
one. Turning off the last screen collapses to "all" rather than leaving no dock
anywhere and no obvious way back.
Pins can be dragged by a grip. The objection this file recorded for a long time
was real -- dragging inside a Flickable inside a scrolling page fails in a way
that reads as breakage -- and the answer is preventStealing on the grip, so the
page cannot claim a gesture that started there. The arrow buttons stay: they are
the keyboard-reachable path and a grip is not. The order is held locally during
the drag and written once on release, rather than rewriting settings.json for
every slot crossed.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
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
Gabriel Brown