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
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
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.
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.
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.
A mode is on because something is true right now: a game is running, a window is
fullscreen on a given display, a workspace is focused, the clock is inside a
window. That is asked again rather than fired once, and it is the whole reason
schedules could be included here without the usual failure modes. A machine
asleep at 23:30, rebooted at 02:00, or opened at 08:00 into a window that has
already passed all reach the right answer by being asked again; an alarm gets
all three wrong.
The midnight-crossing rule is the part worth being careful about: a window
belongs to the day it STARTS on, so a Friday-only 23:30-07:00 covers Saturday
morning and must not cover Saturday night. That arithmetic was tested as pure
logic before anything was built on it, including every malformed input failing
closed -- silencing someone because a time string was wrong is the worst way
this could fail.
This does not take over the manual timed session. FocusSession already owns
that, with its capsule, shortcut, Quick Settings entry and contracts, so modes
defer entirely while one runs. Two writers of Do Not Disturb would each restore
whatever the other happened to leave behind.
Gaming hands over rather than being duplicated. The hook was silencing
notifications itself, which would have made exactly those two owners -- and
Gaming.active only polls while its settings page is open, so a mode could not
have seen a game reliably in any case. The hook reports the game over IPC now
and the mode decides what that means, the Gaming page points at it, and
gamingSilenceNotifications is retired from the schema, since a setting nothing
reads is the dead row this work keeps removing.
Sleep ships disabled. A desktop that starts silencing someone on first boot has
overstepped, whatever the default hour.
Three contracts moved with it. gaming-contract asserted the hook uses setDnd,
which was right before and wrong now; the shell-side assertions that setDnd and
dndState exist stay, because a toggle would flip an already-silent machine back
on. The new contract is proven to fail by breaking the midnight rule and by
letting modes run alongside a manual session.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Live first, because unlike every other page here this one has a live
dimension: card temperature, power draw, whether Game Mode actually
engaged. It polls only while it is open, since a settings page nobody is
looking at has no business waking the CPU.
The part that makes it Panama's page rather than a gamemode config
editor is the hook. gamemode runs a script when a game asks for it and
another when the game exits, so the power profile switches to
performance and notifications go quiet for exactly the duration of a
game -- and afterwards both go back to what they WERE, not to a default.
A Do Not Disturb someone set by hand survives a game; a power profile
someone chose is restored rather than replaced. Verified against real
gamemode activation, not merely by calling the hook.
Two things the page reports rather than hides. Game Mode's headline
trick is switching the CPU governor to performance, and this machine
already runs performance, so it says so instead of implying it helps.
And Proton builds are listed but never chosen: Steam picks the runtime
per game, and a control here would claim an authority this page does not
have.
The hook first called a notifications function that did not exist, and
the one that did was a TOGGLE -- the wrong primitive entirely, since
toggling at game start would unsilence notifications that were already
silent. The shell gained an explicit setter and reader.
search-routing-contract kept its own hand-written list of every page,
which made adding one fail as "not a known page" -- a sixth place to
register a page and a sixth chance to forget. It now derives the mapping
from the shell, which already knows it.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
hyprpolkitagent's dialog is compiled into its binary -- no config, no
stylesheet, nothing to theme -- and it was the one window on this
desktop that looked like it belonged to something else.
The split between the two halves is the security design, not an
implementation detail. A small agent process owns the D-Bus side: it
registers with polkitd, receives the request, and hands the shell the
action, the message, who may answer, and a one-time cookie. It never
sees a password. The shell draws the prompt and, on submit, spawns the
setuid polkit-agent-helper-1 itself and writes the password to that
helper's stdin; the helper runs the PAM conversation and reports to
polkitd directly. The password exists in the shell and in the helper's
stdin and nowhere else -- never on a command line, never over D-Bus,
never through IPC arguments.
The prompt takes exclusive keyboard focus, because a password field that
lets keystrokes reach the window behind it is a keylogger with extra
steps. The request travels as a file created 0600 with O_EXCL inside a
0700 runtime directory: a cookie is not a password, but it is a
capability, and capabilities do not belong in a process listing either.
Three things cost real time. polkitd calls back on the same connection
that registered, so exporting the object on the session bus while
registering from the system bus failed every request as "Not authorized"
with no error anywhere. XDG_SESSION_ID is absent in a systemd user unit,
which runs under [email protected] and belongs to no login session, so the
session comes from logind's Display property instead. And PyGObject does
not accept the @ placeholder in variant format strings.
hyprpolkitagent stays installed as the fallback, only one agent is
started, and the comment beside the autostart says how to get the stock
prompt back. Verified end to end, including a real password accepted and
three cancellations refused.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Super+Tab already cycled windows, but nothing was drawn, so you chose
blind and could only confirm the choice by arriving. A visible switcher
is muscle memory for anyone arriving from macOS or GNOME, and it was the
last item of roadmap phase 03 that did not need coordination.
Ordered most-recently-used, not by creation, because that is what makes
the gesture useful: one Tab returns to the window you just came from.
Hyprland does not report an MRU order, so it is tracked from focus
changes and keyed by address, which is the only property stable for a
window's lifetime.
The gesture needs three binds rather than two. Tab steps the selection,
and the switch is committed on Super RELEASE -- the only way the
compositor can say the gesture is over. That bind is on the bare
modifier, so it fires on every Super release in the session; commit()
returns immediately when nothing is open, which is what makes it
affordable.
A list of names rather than thumbnails: at a glance you are looking for
"the other terminal", and a row of live previews is slower to read and
far more expensive to draw than this gesture deserves.
The interesting part is the bug. The overlay was built, mapped nothing,
and logged absolutely nothing -- because it declared `required property
var screen` while Variants supplies `modelData`. shell.qml has carried a
comment warning about exactly this since the Bar hit it, and I read that
comment earlier in the same session and still walked into it. A comment
that does not stop the person who read it is an argument for a test, so
per-screen-surface-contract now checks every per-screen delegate takes
its screen from modelData. Verified it catches the exact mistake.
Also fixes a regression from 8be3fc2: settings-pages-contract still
required vitalsIntervalMs on Home, where it no longer is. That contract
was pinning the split-across-two-pages arrangement the same commit
fixed, and I pushed without running it.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Panama had grown into three configuration surfaces that only agreed because
they had been typed to agree: looks.lua hardcoded values, DesktopPreferences
independently defaulted the same values, and SystemSettings replayed them at
startup. Nothing kept them in sync, and the Lua side read no shared state at
all. This lands the first three stages of docs/superpowers/plans/2026-08-17-panama-cohesion.md.
Fix silently failing Hyprland writes. On a Lua-configured Hyprland, hyprctl
keyword refuses the write, prints the refusal to stdout, and still exits 0, so
the HDR, VRR, and direct-scanout toggles persisted their value and reported
success while the compositor never changed. Writes now go through hyprctl eval,
which has the same hazard on syntax and runtime errors, so success is defined
as reading the value back and finding it equal. The existing contract passed
throughout the outage because it re-applied the values already in place; the
new one flips each value to something it does not hold.
Derive preferences from a schema. Every setting used to be restated four times
-- a property alias, a JSON adapter property, a change handler, and a line in
reset -- where omitting any one failed silently. PreferenceSchema.qml is now
the single source, and persistence, validation, reset, and the Hyprland mapping
all derive from it. Unknown keys on disk survive a write so a rollback does not
discard a newer build's settings, and a corrupt file falls back to shipped
defaults. The store moved to ~/.config/panama/settings.json, migrating from the
old state directory without deleting it.
Share that file with Hyprland. prefs.lua reads it at config time with every
shipped literal kept as the fallback, so the config still stands alone. The Lua
is the default, the JSON is the truth, and Settings is the editor. The
compositor-adjustable surface goes from 3 keys to 23.
Also fixes two test-hygiene bugs found by running the suite end to end for the
first time: settings-pages-contract could see the window settings-window-contract
leaves behind, and the new write contract was persisting its deliberately-wrong
values into the user's real store.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown