Measured the gap first: of the 38 real Hyprland options Panama's own Lua
sets, only 16 were editable in Settings. Everything else required a text
editor, which is the thing this app exists to stop. This closes most of
that: 66 mapped options now, from 47.
Window shape and shadows on Appearance: corner shape (rounding_power),
focused and fullscreen opacity, shadow falloff and hard-edged shadows.
Window edges, master layout and Hyprland's own notices on Desktop & Dock.
Three of these are corrections rather than additions.
Master layout options existed nowhere, while Settings has offered "Master
and stack" as a choice since this morning -- a layout you can select and
cannot configure is barely a choice. Its card is hidden unless that
layout is actually selected, since settings that do nothing under the
layout you are running are worse than not offering the layout at all.
The four Hyprland notices -- logo, splash, update news, donation nag --
are all turned off by looks.lua on the user's behalf. Defensible as a
default, but not a decision anyone could reverse. They are stored
positively ("show this") and written as Hyprland's `disable_*` through a
new `invert` flag, because a switch labelled "Disable splash text" that
must be ON to hide something is a small cruelty. The Lua does the same
inversion so both sides agree.
Everything new also reads from prefs in looks.lua. Without that these
would apply live and silently revert on the next compositor reload,
which is the failure this codebase keeps designing against.
Two shapes the write path had never seen. Border colours are gradients
and shadow offsets are vec2, and the verifier understood neither -- it
returned false for anything outside int/bool/float/str/css, so both
would have reported every write as rejected. Gradients also need real
care: the stubs declare them as `string|{colors,angle}`, and the string
form carries only ONE stop, so writing "rgba(a) rgba(b) 45deg" as a
string is accepted and keeps the previous value. Verified that directly.
They are also written in one notation and read back in another
(`{colors={"rgba(3b426199)"},angle=45}` becomes `993b4261 45deg`), so
comparison normalises both sides.
Border COLOUR is deliberately not exposed yet. col.inactive_border is
written by ColorScheme on every scheme change, so a user's choice would
be silently overwritten, and col.active_border is the Prism gradient,
which needs a colour control this app does not have. Shadow offset is
left out for the same reason -- the vec2 support is in place for
whenever the widget exists.
Verified each new option applies and reverts against the live
compositor, and that the schema, enum-map, nav, write and commit/reset
contracts all pass.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Light is Tokyo Night Day, the palette's own light variant, rather than
one invented to merely not be dark. Both share the same hues at
different lightness, which is what lets the Prism signature survive the
switch: blue still leads into orchid, it is simply a darker blue on a
lighter ground.
Every colour token became a binding on one boolean, so flipping it
repaints the whole shell without any component needing to know it
happened. That only worked because nothing outside Theme.qml defines a
colour; the two places that did are fixed here.
Surface alphas differ by scheme. The 0.34 that reads as glass over a
dark desktop reads as haze over a light one, and text stops being
legible on it.
Two things that draw on this desktop do not read Panama's store: GTK
applications, which read gsettings, and the compositor, which draws
window borders. A toolbar or a border still wearing the other scheme is
more jarring than either scheme on its own, so ColorScheme pushes the
choice to both. It also pushes at startup, since a scheme chosen in a
previous session would otherwise be in effect only for the shell.
The unfocused window border follows too. It is a flat neutral, and a
dark neutral is invisible against a light desktop. The focused border is
the prism gradient and needs no variant.
The live preview follows the scheme as well. A preview that stayed dark
while the shell around it went light did not read as "your desktop", it
read as a screenshot of someone else's.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Theme.qml was the largest remaining thing in this desktop that could
only be changed by editing a file, and typeface is the first thing
someone changes when they want a desktop to feel like theirs. Interface
font, icon font, and the base text size are settings now.
The two font choices are deliberately separate lists. Theme.fontMono is
used only to draw glyphs -- workspace pills, the status cluster, search
icons -- so a plain monospace family there replaces every icon in the
shell with tofu. The picker offers only Nerd Fonts for that slot and
says why.
Candidates are rendered in the family they name. A list of font names
set in the current font tells you nothing about what you are choosing.
The four type sizes derive from the base rather than being stored
separately, so the relationship between body, caption, heading and title
survives a change instead of four numbers drifting apart.
hypr/looks.lua reads the same key. Following the preference only on the
QML side would leave the compositor and the shell disagreeing about the
interface font, which nobody notices until a tooltip renders in a
different typeface.
Only a family this machine reports is accepted: the value reaches
hl.config as a string, and a settings file moved between machines will
name fonts that are not installed. A missing family is reported rather
than silently substituted by fontconfig.
Also collapses the wallpaper grid to two rows. Sixty tiles is two
screens of pictures on a page that also holds typography, window
geometry and effects -- everything below it was unreachable without
scrolling past all of them.
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