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
They were written down five times: ThemeProfileModel.js for QML,
looks.lua for the compositor, and again in panama-theme-apps and
panama-lock. The GNOME accent-name mapping was a sixth list. Adding a
ninth accent meant editing all of them, and the file most likely to be
missed was the lock screen, which fails silently -- the machine locks
in last season's colour and nothing says why. panama-theme-apps
admitted it in a comment: "there is no shared source between QML and a
shell script".
config/palette.json is that source now. looks.lua reads it through a
new prefs.readJson, which uses the same never-raise parser the settings
store uses, so an unreadable palette costs the accent colours and never
the compositor config. The two shell generators read it through
scripts/panama-palette, which also carries the hex-to-rgb conversion
hyprlock needs and the GNOME member lookup.
QML keeps its table, because a .js module imported into QML cannot read
a file. That is still a copy, so the palette contract compares the two
value by value -- every accent, every field -- and fails on any
disagreement. Verified by planting a wrong hex and watching it name the
exact field.
The adwaita contract used to check the shell's own copy of the GNOME
mapping. It now checks that the shell resolves through the palette, and
fails if that copy ever grows back.
The recent accent-colour setting only reached part of the desktop.
looks.lua still hardcoded the focused-window border and glow to blue,
so any hyprctl reload -- or every fresh session, for about a second --
reverted a chosen accent; it now reads accentName the same way it
already read colorScheme. The lock screen and terminal stayed blue
regardless of the chosen accent despite the setting's own description
claiming otherwise; panama-lock and panama-theme-apps now resolve and
apply the real accent.
AccentPicker built its swatch model from Theme.accents directly
instead of the schema's own options list, so the two could drift
silently; switched it to read the schema. Its hit target only covered
the swatch, not the name label added specifically for colour-vision
accessibility -- extended to the whole row. Settings search had no
route for the "appearance" group, so searching for the accent or
colour scheme landed on Home.
ColorScheme's hex-to-Hyprland helper assumed 6-digit colours and would
silently corrupt a future translucent one; fixed it to read from the
end of the string instead of the start. An accent-only change no
longer reruns the full colour-scheme pipeline. The gradient it builds
for the focused border now goes through SystemSettings' existing
serialiser instead of a second, under-escaped copy of the same logic.
The settings-ownership contract test enforced the old rule that
ColorScheme must never touch the focused border; updated it to verify
the real, intended rule instead of contradicting the code.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E6TJUAh41HaP25MVHWkhRZ
Gabriel Brown