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