Restoring defaults clears every preference and the Home accessory store,
and nothing in the app can undo it. Snapshots existed but were entirely
manual, so the one irreversible action Panama offers was also the one
with no safety net.
It now snapshots first. Not fatal if that fails: someone who asked to
reset gets their reset, and a snapshot that could not be written is
reported rather than allowed to block what they asked for.
The wiring is inverted deliberately. SettingsBackup already references
SystemSettings, so referencing it back would make two singletons depend
on each other, which is an initialisation-order problem waiting to
happen. Instead SystemSettings exposes a seam defaulting to a no-op and
SettingsBackup installs itself into it at startup -- the same shape as
the seams the reset path already uses for test isolation.
The contract asserts the snapshot is FIRST in the call sequence, not
merely present. A snapshot taken after the stores were cleared would
faithfully record the wiped state as the user's own, which is worse than
no snapshot: it looks like a safety net and is a copy of the damage.
Verified against both mutations -- removing the snapshot, and moving it
after the wipe.
One trap, hit for the third time today: QML allows only one
Component.onCompleted per object, and SettingsBackup already had one.
Adding a second does not fail locally -- it poisons the entire services
module, so every singleton reports "Type X unavailable" and the real
error is the last line of a forty-line cascade.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
colour -> color, behaviour -> behavior, centre -> center, favourite ->
favorite, and about twenty other pairs, applied consistently across
comments, docs, error/UI copy, and a handful of QML identifiers that
used the British spelling as their actual name: SystemSettings'
serialiseValue/serialiseTable/normaliseGradient, Displays'
normaliseModes, Wallpaper's normalisePolicy, SettingsBackup's
serialiseHomeState, DateTime's ntpSynchronised property, Clipboard's
_normalise helper, and ShortcutCapture's cancelled signal (with its
onCancelled handler in ShortcutsPage.qml). Every call site and the two
tests that assert on the literal source text (settings-ownership and
settings-backup-live contracts) were updated in lockstep.
Left untouched: config/dot/espanso/match/packages/misspell-en/ is a
vendored third-party autocorrect dictionary -- its entries are typo
corrections, not our prose, and rewriting them would fight the
package's own purpose (and any future re-sync from upstream).
The already-American `favorites` property (Home page pinned
accessories) was never actually misspelled -- only nearby comments and
error strings said "favourites" -- so no data migration was needed
there.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E6TJUAh41HaP25MVHWkhRZ
The Dock's pinned applications were a sixteen-entry literal in
Settings.qml, so changing what sits in the Dock meant editing QML. They
are now an ordered list in the shared store, with move up, move down,
unpin, and a filtered picker for adding installed applications. Keeping
them in the shared store rather than a file of their own means they are
covered by Restore defaults like everything else.
This needed a "json" schema type for values the schema stores and resets
but does not validate field by field. It exists so structured settings
can live in the one file rather than growing a fourth preference store;
the owning service validates the contents.
Snapshots make the settings app safe to experiment with. The whole
configuration is one file, so a backup is a copy and a restore is an
overwrite, and restoring snapshots what it replaces so it is itself
undoable. A snapshot is validated as JSON before it can be restored over
a working configuration, and a name that is not a plain snapshot
filename from the backup directory is refused.
Snapshot names carry milliseconds. At one-second resolution a save
followed promptly by a restore produced the same filename twice, and the
restore's own safety snapshot overwrote the file it was about to read --
found by the contract, which restores immediately after saving.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown