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
Shipping met reality tonight, and reality won three rounds before we
did. mpvpaper's -f forks it into the background, which a supervisor
reads as instant death — the respawn loop repainted the desktop black
once a second. The reaper's own kills fired onExited like crashes, so
the supervisor ate its young until deliberate deaths got marked. And
the video's path shared wallpaperPath with the still pipeline, whose
transactional persistence clobbered it — it now lives under its own
videoWallpaperPath key, read by the lock screen and the doctor too.
Restore is the service's own now, reactive and once per session: a
one-shot timer raced the async preference load and availability probe
at cold start and silently lost. A video-wallpaper IPC target drives
start/stop/pause from a terminal and from the contract sweep to come.
Verified live: one player per output, same PID across restarts, VAAPI
engaged, 0.2% CPU steady for 1440p30 h264, pause from the bar pill.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
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
Home is now Overview | My Home | Phone. Overview leads with quick-action
tiles (focus, Do Not Disturb, health, snapshots, storage), keeps the
findings card — updates fold in, the reclaim-space prompt is gone on
purpose — and adds glance cards, the next calendar event, and weather.
My Home groups every light by Home Assistant area: the helper gained an
`areas` command (one REST template render, no websocket), and the rooms
degrade to a flat list on setups without areas. The favorites editor and
connection card moved intact. Phone gains a vitals strip — battery and
cell signal read from KDE Connect's plugin D-Bus objects, where absence
is data, not an error — beside ring, clipboard, send-a-file, and the
BlueBubbles handoff.
The retired home-phone id resolves to my-home forever via a new alias
map in SettingsRoutes (with a hasOwnProperty guard so prototype names
cannot leak into settingsPage). Storage no longer claims 0 B free — the
old page read a field the disks helper never emitted.
Contracts updated alongside; per the new workflow, the full suite runs
once at the end of the redesign (see the test backlog note).
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
The sidebar was a flat scan of thirty-one rows; now it reads like a
settings app. Multi-subject categories (Input, Network & Sharing,
Applications, Users & Accounts, Privacy & Security, System) carry an
Appearance-style tab strip above the page, drawn by the shell so the
leaf pages themselves are untouched. The taxonomy lives in one new
file, services/SettingsRoutes.qml; the sidebar, the strip, route
validation, search breadcrumbs, and both generators derive from it.
ShellState.settingsPage still holds leaf ids, so every deep link, IPC
call, and search result keeps working — and now lands on the exact
tab. Dictation moves out of Sound onto its own page under Input, with
a handoff back to Sound for the microphone. The strip scrolls when
System's nine tabs outgrow a tiled window. All 161 contracts pass.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
A sweep for controls wired to targets the backend does not handle -- the shape
of the dictation bug -- found one more: "Start Orca" on the Accessibility page
called openApplication("orca") with no "orca" in the command map, so it set an
error and launched nothing. orca ships in hyprland-packages; it now runs.
That is the whole count. Every service-method call across 84 settings pages
resolves, every helper subcommand a service invokes is implemented, every
openGnomePanel handoff is allow-listed. Two dead buttons existed in the entire
settings app -- the dictation Download and this -- and both are fixed.
settings-buttons-contract pins the class: every openApplication id and
openGnomePanel panel a QML button passes must be present in SystemSettings'
dispatch maps, both of which return false silently on an unknown name.
Verified it catches the orca button when the fix is reverted.
And a dependency-contract exception the ffmpeg fix needed: ffmpeg is provided
by a swap (ffmpeg-free -> ffmpeg), never a list entry, because listing it is
the conflict that fix removed -- so panama-transcode's use of it is satisfied
without a package name to point at.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
The Download button on Sound → Dictation ran `panama-dictate download`. There
is no such command: the helper answered {"ok": false, "error":
"unknown-command"} and the button did nothing, every time, for anyone who
tried it. The real command is `setup`, which pulls the speech server image
and downloads the ~490 MB model together -- one trip, by design. And the card
told you the server needed `panama app whisper-vulkan`, an app that exists in
no package or setup/apps entry; the server is a prebuilt image the helper
pulls with podman.
So the card described three things and got all three wrong. It now shows the
real state of both pieces and offers one action -- "Set up dictation" -- wired
to the command that actually fetches them, with progress that names which half
is running (server image, then model). Verified end to end: `panama-dictate
setup` emits the pulling/downloading JSON the service parses.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
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
The audit's fourth tier -- what a Framework owner reaches for in the first
week and found missing.
The power button stops being an instant, unconfirmed poweroff: a shipped
logind drop-in tells the daemon to stand down and the compositor binds the
key to the power menu, the way GNOME turns it into a question. Holding it
still hard-cuts through firmware. change-settings restarts logind so the
change applies without waiting for a boot, and the Power page says what the
button does now.
The function row fills in: F10 (XF86RFKill) toggles airplane mode through a
new panama-osd verb that blocks or unblocks every radio and says which way it
went; F9 (XF86Display) opens the Displays page, the honest action until
mirroring exists. And the lid becomes a switch bind: closing a docked lid
turns the internal panel off so nothing renders inside a closed shell and no
workspace strands on an invisible output, and opening it restores the panel
with the mode and scale chosen in Settings. panama-lid owns both decisions;
undocked machines suspend via logind before any of it matters.
The battery gets an endgame. On battery the screen dims to 30% two-thirds of
the way to blanking -- GNOME's single largest idle battery saver -- and
restores exactly the level it saved. At the urgent threshold the machine
suspends after a fifteen-second grace, cancelled by plugging in, because a
suspend preserves the session for days and a hard cut at 0% preserves
nothing; "Only warn" remains a choice on the Power page. Hibernate joins the
power menu, but only where logind answers CanHibernate with yes -- an entry
that fails silently is worse than none.
And brightness stops being two code paths: the Displays page now embeds the
same control the quick-settings panel uses, so the built-in backlight and
DDC/CI monitors share one surface that withdraws itself where neither
exists. The lid contract narrows to what its principle protects -- a
HandleLidSwitch drop-in -- so deliberate policy for other keys can ship.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
The audit's third tier: everything between this installer and a fresh machine
it has never met.
The one path that could cost a person their display: the interview probes
Secure Boot with mokutil, which install-packages had not installed yet, so on
a minimal base the MOK question silently never fired -- and install-hardware
still installed akmod-nvidia and blacklisted nouveau, arming a reboot into an
unloadable driver with its fallback disabled. The probe tools (pciutils,
mokutil, fwupd) now bootstrap beside gum, and install-hardware re-checks
Secure Boot for itself and refuses the driver rather than the display.
Secrets leave the checkout: the personal environment moves to
~/.config/panama/env at mode 600 by migration, and .bashrc sources it with a
permission check that quietly re-tightens drift. change-settings no longer
overwrites /etc/dnf/dnf.conf -- two performance keys are set additively, the
defaultyes=True that made every `dnf remove` treat Enter as yes is gone, and
a migration strips it from machines that already received it.
Package installation survives the world changing: the initial and desktop
lists run with --skip-unavailable and a report_missing pass that names what
was skipped (resolved through --whatprovides, so capability names like awk
do not cry wolf); the openh264, appstream and core-group extras go through
soft; RustDesk resolves its RPM for the machine's own architecture; and the
Claude Desktop repository script is fetched to a kept file and run, never
piped from the network into root.
The hardware predicates stop guessing: a wireless mouse's scope=Device
battery no longer turns a tower into a laptop, USB-PD-only machines read
their power state from the battery's own status instead of being permanently
"on AC", the lid falls back to logind's LidClosed where ACPI is silent, and
charge limits reach every pack of a two-battery machine in one authorization
-- with the reported percentage summed across packs.
And the parsers stop assuming this machine: snapper is read through
--machine-readable csv with named columns instead of a localized box-drawing
table, and reports whether snapshots are even possible so ext4 and
unconfigured-btrfs stop looking identical; fprintd is parsed under LC_ALL=C;
the hypridle drop-in resolves the binary it points at; the recorder's render
node became an "auto" token resolved at record time; update-grub writes the
config its firmware actually boots; the nvm prompt hook and the SSH tmux
takeover are guarded; hipblas and rocm-opencl move to an opt-in gpu-compute
category; and the two interactive python tools' libraries are declared.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
The audit's second tier: values that were measurements of the author's
desktop, shipped to every machine as if they were defaults.
Settings greeted every human as Gabriel; it now greets whoever
accountsservice says is signed in, and nobody when it says nothing. The
weather shipped his home coordinates and confidently reported his forecast
anywhere on earth; it now ships unset, fetches nothing until a location is
chosen, and the location row says so. The GTK bookmarks carried seven
/home/gib paths and his file server into every file dialog; they are now
generated per machine from a template and gitignored -- Nautilus edits the
instance freely, the way settings.ini already worked one file over. Web
search routed through his personal bang redirector; the engine is now the
webSearchUrl preference with a DuckDuckGo default, read by both the script
command and the suggestions extension, which the launcher-search contract
already pins to one another. The GPU vitals path defaulted to his card1 and
lost the readout on any machine enumerated differently; a machine with
exactly one GPU now adopts it. And the Containers and Snapshots pages hide
once a scan proves their backing stack absent, instead of rendering
permanently empty on machines that never had podman or snapper.
Lesser residue swept in the same pass: the DP-2 hyprpaper block one machine
needed, the author's username-typo expansions (moved to his personal seed in
user/, where personal content belongs), a capture fallback into /home/gib,
and a parity table asserting one machine's hardware as fact.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Epx9ZC1gwm81K3jm9x9CKh
The audit's first tier, in one change: every case found where the interface
asserted something the system did not do.
Twenty-one compositor-owned preferences -- the whole Mouse & Touchpad page,
plus window layout, snapping, dim-inactive and the magnifier -- had the live
half (hyprctl eval) and not the config-time half, so they quietly reverted on
every hyprctl reload. All 70 hypr-backed keys now have a prefs.get() in the
Lua, and hypr-prefs-contract pins both the presence and that the Lua fallback
equals the schema default, which is how the touchpad page misreported natural
scrolling on first boot.
The idle generator fell back from unwritten battery keys to the AC values
while the Power page displayed the schema defaults: a fresh laptop showed
"suspend at 20 minutes" and generated no suspend listener, then discharged to
zero in a bag. Unwritten keys now use the defaults the page shows
(idle-defaults-contract pins generator to schema; idle-config-contract
re-pinned to the new rule with the tradeoff recorded), and change-settings
enables managed idle on any machine with a battery -- without starting
hypridle in whatever session the installer runs under.
The per-app lock-screen notification switches wrote fields nothing read:
hyprlock cannot render notifications. Removed, with the rule model shrunk to
{enabled}, stale stored fields dropped at normalization, and the contract now
forbidding the page from growing lock-screen switches it cannot honor.
The battery warning thresholds were searchable, documented as "Found on
Power & Lock", and rendered nowhere -- and crossing the low threshold changed
only a glyph's color. Both sliders now exist where search was already sending
people, and low battery publishes a real notification at important priority.
Three handoffs opened GNOME panels that are inert in a Hyprland session. The
keyboard handoff is gone (that panel writes gsettings nothing here reads, and
the working controls sat on the same page); Connectivity gains a Wi-Fi row
that opens GNOME's actual Wi-Fi panel -- hidden SSIDs and 802.1X finally have
a road -- beside the network row that legitimately drives NetworkManager; the
universal-access handoff is gone, its few working toggles being controls this
app already owns. And the accessibility page now gives the true reason sticky
keys are missing: each Wayland compositor implements its own and Hyprland
does not yet -- not "an X11 feature with no Wayland equivalent," which sent
people to the wrong conclusion about the platform.
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
The last of Section F, and the only thing in Panama that reads an
authentication token, so most of the design is about that rather than
about the number.
It never refreshes the token and never writes to the credentials file.
That token expires roughly hourly and Claude Code refreshes it on
demand; if this refreshed it too, two processes would be rotating one
credential, and a rotation invalidates the other holder's copy. The
failure mode is being silently signed out of Claude Code by a status
widget, which no bar indicator is worth. So it reads the token, uses it
while valid, and reports "waiting for Claude Code to refresh" when not
-- which covers the case that matters, because while you are using
Claude Code the token is fresh, and while you are not there is nothing
to watch.
The token never reaches argv either: curl takes the Authorization
header on stdin through --config, because a header passed as an
argument sits in /proc/<pid>/cmdline for the length of the request.
Same rule the password and MOK paths already follow. And it never
reaches the output: the record carries percentages and timestamps and
nothing else. Both are pinned, and both were checked by sabotaging the
collector to pass -H and watching the contract name it.
Off by default. It is a coding-tool readout, not something a
general-purpose desktop shows without being asked, and it hides unless
the collector has real numbers rather than displaying "unknown".
Making the plain application keys focus an existing window was the
wrong call. It reads well in a demo and it is what macOS does, but it
made "give me another terminal" the awkward case -- and on a tiling
desktop a second terminal beside the first is the normal way to work,
not an edge case. Reaching for the launcher to open a second file
manager is not an improvement on anything.
So the plain keys do what they always did, and SUPER+ALT is the new
capability rather than a tax on the old one: go to the terminal,
editor, browser, files, calculator or mail you already have, wherever
it is, and start one only if there is none.
ALT rather than SHIFT because SUPER+SHIFT is already the
window-manipulation space -- Files, Neovim and Settings would have
collided with Focus session, Taller and Shorter, and breaking two keys
out of the eight-key resize set to make room is the worse trade.
Also fixes a real trap found while using it. The Alt-Tab overlay
commits on SUPER release, which is a compositor bind running an IPC
call; if that call ever fails to land, the overlay stayed up with no
keyboard focus, no Escape handler and nothing clickable, so the only
way out was an IPC call typed into a terminal it was covering. Clicking
outside now dismisses it, clicking a row switches to that window --
which is the obvious thing to try and did nothing -- and an abandoned
switch closes itself after ten seconds. Keyboard focus still stays with
the compositor, because taking it mid-switch is what would break
stepping.
Two of Section E's small wins.
panama-webapp gives a site its own icon, its own window with no browser
chrome, and its own launcher entry, which is most of what "installed"
means in practice and what both macOS and Windows now ship. It scrapes
the site's apple-touch-icon, falls back twice, and never fails an
install over a favicon: a web app with a generic icon still works.
Names are slugged, so "../../../../tmp/pwn" lands inside the
applications directory as tmp-pwn rather than anywhere else, and
remove refuses anything without the marker it writes -- sharing a name
with a real application must not delete that application. A browser
that cannot do app mode is told so rather than handed something that
opens an ordinary window and pretends.
The charger now announces itself through StatusEvents, which was
already the right layer and only wanted a producer. Ambient priority,
so Do Not Disturb quiets it, because a charger is exactly what DND is
for. A critically low battery is published at a priority DND does not
silence, because the one message you must not miss is the one saying
the machine is about to stop. Both join the existing silent-startup
window rather than announcing the state they found.
The keyboard-layout toast the plan also listed is deliberately not
built. Hyprland exposes the active keymap but not a change event
Quickshell already consumes, so it would need either polling or new
event plumbing, and this machine has one layout and could not test it.
docs/ is engineering artifacts -- design specs, plans, an upstream
ledger -- and none of it is written for the person who has to live
here. Five chapters that are: coming from another desktop, the
keyboard, windows and workspaces, when something breaks, and making it
yours.
Rendered inside Settings rather than opened in a browser, so a chapter
that says "the Displays page reverts after fifteen seconds" is one
click from the Displays page. Qt's markdown renderer does the work;
one chapter per Text, because Text has an implicit texture size limit
and a document long enough to hit it goes blank rather than
complaining.
The chapters live beside the shell in manual/ rather than at the
repository root, which departs from the plan. The reason is the path:
the shell finds them through Quickshell.shellDir, which is correct
wherever the repository is, whereas walking upward out of the shell
directory is only correct by accident. The contract fails that pattern
if it comes back.
The contract also pins the set both ways -- every chapter listed
exists, every chapter that exists is listed -- because a renamed file
shows an error card where a chapter should be, which reads as a broken
manual rather than as a moved file.
Thirty settings pages is the opposite of the usual problem: a person
arriving from GNOME, macOS or Windows cannot tell which few things
matter. This is those few, once, on the first start.
Not a tour. Nobody reads a tour, and a multi-step wizard on a desktop
somebody just installed is one more thing between them and using it.
One card, five keys, and a way out.
The chords come from the live keymap rather than being written here, so
a machine whose owner has already rebound something teaches what they
actually have. A welcome screen is the one surface read by somebody
with no way to tell it is wrong, which is exactly why it must not be.
Two deliberate departures from how every other surface behaves. It does
not close on a click outside, because a stray click in the first thirty
seconds would throw away the only explanation on offer. And dismissing
by any route marks it seen, Escape included, because a desktop that
reintroduces itself every login has failed to take no for an answer.
It stays reachable from the launcher afterwards, since the moment
somebody wants it again is exactly when a one-shot has thrown it away.
Also teaches the keymap to spell punctuation: slash, period, comma and
the rest were rendering as their raw keysym names, so the welcome
screen offered "Super + slash" and the cheatsheet agreed with it.
The Shortcuts settings page answers "how do I change this", which is
worth opening a window for. This answers the other question, the one
you have with your hands already on the keyboard, so it is an overlay
on SUPER + / and the same key closes it.
It reads Keybinds.grouped() rather than a written-down list, so a
shortcut rebound in Settings shows its new chord here with nothing kept
in sync. A cheatsheet that lies is worse than none: it gets consulted
exactly when somebody does not already know.
Three columns, balanced by how many shortcuts each category holds. The
first attempt used a Flow, which wraps into as many columns as it likes
and made 120 binds across six uneven categories unreadable; it also
sized the card from a child that filled it, which is a circular binding
and produced a card taller than the display with its contents running
off the bottom. Both were found by looking at it rather than by a test,
which is the argument for looking at it.
Fixes a real bug on the way past: luaChord and formatChord appended the
key unconditionally, so the window switcher's modifier-only release
bind became "SUPER + " with a dangling separator. That matched neither
the chord keybinds.lua binds nor the one an override is keyed by, so
that bind could never be rebound and had no category -- it was sitting
in a seventh group of its own, which is how it was noticed.
The Shortcuts page grouped shortcuts by matching substrings in their
descriptions, which put "Close window" and "Close the notification
list" in the same group and left anything phrased unusually in
whichever bucket matched first. The cheatsheet that comes next would
have inherited the same guesswork.
keybinds.lua says it outright now. Its sections already were the
categories, so a section sets one and the binds below inherit it: one
line per section instead of one per bind, and a new bind lands in the
category of the section somebody wrote it in without having to
remember anything.
Hyprland reports a Lua bind's dispatcher as __lua with a bytecode
offset, so nothing can be attached to a bind that survives into
`hyprctl binds`. The config writes a manifest at load instead, keyed
by the chord actually bound so the shell can join on what it sees.
Writing never raises: a read-only state directory costs the grouping,
never the keymap, and the shell keeps the old derivation as its
fallback so a machine that has not reloaded its compositor still works.
The one failure mode is a section that forgets to set a category and
silently inherits the one above. That is not hypothetical -- it
happened while writing this, because the dictation section sits in the
middle of the media binds and its category leaked onto the volume,
media and brightness keys below it. The contract walks the file for
sections with binds and no category, and spot-checks the boundaries
where inheritance is doing the work.
hypr/monitors.lua applies the stored per-output entries when the
compositor reads its config, and never again. A monitor plugged in an
hour later got the compositor's automatic placement instead of the
position, scale and rotation this machine was told to use, and the
only way back was to open Settings and apply it again. Docking should
not cost you your desk.
Deliberately not a confirmed transaction. applyLayout arms a fifteen
second countdown because it is about to show you something you might
not be able to undo; this restores a layout you already confirmed, on
hardware you already had, and a countdown would be asking you to
re-approve your own decision every time you sat down.
It refuses rather than guesses when the stored mode is one the
connected panel does not offer -- DP-1 on one dock is not DP-1 on
another -- and when the surviving layout would name no primary. Both
land on the compositor's automatic placement plus a toast that opens
the Displays page, which is recoverable; silence would not be. That
toast needed a new open-settings verb in StatusEvents, whose page name
goes through ShellState's existing allow-list.
The decision is split from the action as plannedRestore so it can be
tested without driving a real compositor, and the harness sets topology
and stored arrangement in one call because a real query landing between
two would replace the fixture. Both fixtures travel base64: qs ipc call
splits a JSON array of several objects into one argument per object,
so a two-monitor fixture was arriving as an extra argument.
logind handles the lid correctly except for the one case it cannot
see: an external display means a closed lid is a docked machine, not
one being put away. Its own docked test looks for an ACPI docking
station that modern hardware does not have.
Panama does not take the lid over to fix that. It holds a logind
handle-lid-switch inhibitor while an external display is connected and
releases it when the last one goes, which needs no lid watcher, no
polling, and no drop-in. The direction it fails in is the point: if the
guard dies, logind's default comes back and a docked laptop suspends,
which is annoying. A drop-in setting HandleLidSwitch=ignore plus a
watcher of our own fails the other way, leaving a lid that does nothing
at all on a machine being carried out of a building.
Locking on the way down needed no work: hypridle's before_sleep_cmd
already runs loginctl lock-session, so a lid-close suspend is a locked
suspend. The contract fails anything that duplicates it.
Not yet verified against a real lid, which is stated in the helper's
header rather than implied by silence. The decision logic, the
inhibitor's shape, and every machine that should hold none of it are
covered.
An idle screen costs a screen on wall power and the rest of your
afternoon on battery, so they should not be the same number. hypridle
has no concept of a power source -- one config, one set of timeouts --
so rather than maintaining two configs and swapping them, panama-idle
builds the single config from whichever key set applies, and IdleLock
rebuilds it when the charger comes or goes. That runs through the same
400ms debounce a settings change uses, so a loose charger cannot
restart hypridle in a loop.
The battery keys fall back to their AC counterparts rather than to the
schema defaults. Without that, unplugging would silently override a
deliberately long timing with a shipped short one, which is the kind
of thing you would notice only by losing work.
A machine with no battery reads none of it and generates exactly what
it generated before. The contract pins that alongside the two obvious
directions, and was checked by sabotaging the detection to confirm it
fails rather than passing vacuously.
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.
panama-sudo is pkexec with a stated reason: the reason travels to the
shell over the existing polkit IPC target, and the prompt renders it
labeled "Stated reason (unverified)" beside polkitd's real action
message -- beside, never instead of, because any process can claim any
reason and the action text is the trust anchor. Reasons are single-shot
and expire in ten seconds, so a stale one cannot dress up an unrelated
prompt; without a reason, a running shell, or qs the wrapper is exactly
pkexec. Built for agents, so the person typing their password learns
what for. Verified live end to end -- reason shown, consumed once,
expired when stale, cleared on dismissal -- and pinned by the polkit
reason contract.
Arrange the desktop, run "Save Layout as Project" from the launcher, name it.
"Open Project" lays it out again on free workspaces, so it never lands on top of
what you are already doing. Saved layouts are listed on the Desktop settings
page, which is where they are removed.
Recorded rather than written by hand, and a terminal's directory is most of why
it is worth having: without it a project opens three terminals in your home
folder and you change directory three times. This machine had two terminals in
the same project when it was written, and reopening there is the difference
between a layout and a working desktop.
Four things had to be found by running it, none of which reading would have
shown.
A terminal's directory is not the terminal's working directory -- that is where
it was launched from. The shell inside it is what has been cd'd. Reading the
wrong one looked correct for exactly as long as the terminals under test had
been started from the right place, which they had.
gtk-launch cannot place a window. It activates over D-Bus, so the process
Hyprland started exits and a [workspace N silent] rule has nothing left to apply
to; Nautilus landed on whatever workspace was in front of you. The Exec line
from the desktop entry is run directly instead. But DBusActivatable
applications do the same thing regardless, so the window is found afterwards and
moved by address -- which also means a window that never appeared is reported
rather than assumed.
/proc/PID/task/PID/children is a file of pids, not a directory. Listing it as
one always raised, so the fast path was never once taken and everything went
through pgrep.
And kitty's --directory needs an equals sign or the short -d; the
space-separated long form is accepted and silently ignored.
The contract exercises a save and open round trip against a stubbed compositor,
and reads a terminal's directory out of a real process tree rather than grepping
the source for a shell name -- an earlier version passed against a helper that
had been changed back, because the constant was still there.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
Screenshots and recordings offered three folders to choose between, and three
guesses cannot include the folder somebody's other software already writes to --
which is the only folder that matters. This machine has had ~/Pictures/Screenshots
and ~/Videos/Screencasts since long before Panama, and Panama was writing
recordings to a Videos/Recordings it invented. Both are free text now, and the
recording default is the folder that was already there.
Wallpapers were swept from four directories at once, so the distribution's stock
images arrived mixed in with the user's own and there was no way to ask for just
one. Where wallpapers live is something somebody knows about their own machine.
It is a setting, not a search.
All three accept an absolute path as well as one relative to home, which meant
fixing Capture: it prefixed $HOME unconditionally, so naming /mnt/captures would
have written screenshots to ~/mnt/captures and left nobody able to find them.
The generator turned out to skip any entry whose comment sits inside the braces
rather than above them -- it looks for `key:` immediately after `{`. Three
settings were invisible in the reference because of it, one of them dockScreens,
which has never appeared there at all. The staleness contract could not see it
either: regenerating reproduced the same omission, so the copy was current and
incomplete at once. It now counts what was declared against what it could read
and refuses rather than quietly documenting less than exists.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
Super+D holds the microphone open, releasing it transcribes on the GPU and
types the result wherever the cursor is. Roughly 150ms for a normal utterance
once the model is resident, measured rather than hoped for.
Getting there meant discarding two approaches. Fedora 44 cannot install any
GPU-capable Whisper for Python -- openai-whisper needs a numba that needs an
llvmlite that does not exist for 3.14, and faster-whisper needs a ctranslate2
nobody packaged. The whisper-cpp package IS built with HIP but ships libraries
with no binary and no bindings, and hand-writing ctypes for a large by-value
struct is a segfault waiting for a version bump. So a container, as suggested.
Vulkan rather than ROCm, and upstream's image rather than one built here. ROCm
is seven gigabytes and serves AMD alone; Vulkan compute runs on the AMD, Intel
and NVIDIA machines this config is used on, in a twentieth of the space. The
Vulkan tag already contains whisper-server, so there is no Containerfile to keep
working -- an earlier draft of this commit had one, and it was strictly worse.
Two bugs found by using it rather than by reading it. Whisper describes silence
as the literal text "[BLANK_AUDIO]", and the first working version pasted that
string into the clipboard; a transcription that is nothing but such markers is
now discarded. And the server answers with a line per segment, which typed into
a window is an Enter press -- sending the half-written message, submitting the
form. Whitespace is collapsed to one line.
Neither the image nor the model is installed by ./install. Together they are
over two gigabytes that want the network, and Settings offers both as one
action instead. Nothing starts at login either: whisper-server holds the model
from the moment it starts, so the first press of the key is what brings it up.
The contract pins both text bugs, that the server stays on loopback, and that it
does not start at login. Reverting the [BLANK_AUDIO] guard did not fail it at
first -- the check was still correct, it had simply stopped being called -- so
it now checks the call site too.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
GNOME's Multitasking panel asked one workspace question worth reproducing, and
it is not which workspace goes on which screen. It is whether the second screen
participates at all: workspaces on the primary display only, or each screen with
its own. Ten rows of per-workspace assignment would be more powerful and worse.
Off is Hyprland's own behaviour and emits nothing. On pins workspaces 1 to 10 --
however many ALT+1..ALT+0 actually reach, read from keybinds.lua rather than
written down twice -- to whichever output is recorded as primary. With no
primary recorded, nothing is pinned: guessing one would move every workspace
onto whichever output happened to sort first, and this machine is in exactly
that state.
Applying is a reload, which is the part that shaped the design. Hyprland reads
workspace rules at config time and will not remove one afterwards -- a rule
written with an empty monitor keeps its old binding, which was checked rather
than assumed. Only a reload clears them, so the config is the only honest source
and the page cannot pretend a change has landed before one happens. Hence a
service that reads `hyprctl workspacerules` back rather than inferring success
from having written the preference, and a Reload row that exists only while the
two disagree.
Verified end to end against the live compositor and put back: off emits nothing,
on emits ten rules naming the primary, and turning it off clears them. The
settings file came back byte-identical.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
Phase 6, the last of the fresh-install spec.
159 scripts lose their .sh: 110 contracts, 47 Vicinae commands, 2 compositor
contracts. A shebang and the executable bit already select the interpreter. The
extension only ever added something that had to stay in sync, and the rename
proved the point twice over in the space of an hour.
The spec's stated risk was Vicinae's script discovery. One script was renamed and
reloaded on its own before the other 46 followed; it came back as
scripts:panama.capture and all 47 resolve. What the probe turned up instead is
that the extension was never only a filename: Vicinae's command IDs embed it, so
every ID changed. Nothing in this repository refers to them, so nothing breaks.
The only trace is Vicinae's metadata.json, whose visited map had two Panama
entries that are now orphaned -- two commands lost their usage ranking and will
earn it back. Worth knowing before anyone renames these again on a machine that
has a keybind pointing at one.
Rewriting the references by exact filename missed two things it structurally
could not see: a name built from a variable, settings-$page.sh, and a glob,
-name '*.sh'. Both were in the contract that counts the generated commands, which
promptly reported 47 expected and 0 found. The mechanical part of a rename is the
part that looks finished.
The three subcommands. panama doctor fronts a health check that already existed
and already ran at the end of every install but could not be reached from a
terminal. panama upgrade re-runs the installer from anywhere. panama test runs
the suite, which had no entry point at all -- 121 files that were the main safety
net in this repository and were invisible in it.
Writing that runner found three tests nothing was running.
calendar_agenda_bridge_test, home_assistant_bridge_test and kdeconnect_bridge_test
are unittest suites without the executable bit, so no contract invoked them and
the first draft of the runner skipped them silently. All three pass, and have
passed unobserved for weeks. The runner collects *_test.py as well now, because a
runner with a blind spot is worse than no runner for the same reason a dependency
checker with one is: it reports PASS.
Six worktrees pruned. Each was re-checked rather than trusted to the spec's list,
and two needed it: panama-commands is not on feat/panama-commands but on
feat/gnome-tweaks-parity, and fix/panama-displays-review reads [ahead 3] -- ahead
of its remote, not of main, with every commit patch-equivalent to landed work.
roadmap-completion stays; it has five commits that are genuinely unlanded. The
branches are left alone: pruning a worktree costs nothing, deleting a branch is a
decision.
121 contracts pass.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NvgBuSWB5sE43yWmg21ozj
Gabriel Brown