Continuing towards GNOME Settings parity. GNOME's Privacy panel covers
screen lock, camera and microphone access, file history, trash, and
device security; Panama had no equivalent page at all, despite already
tracking camera and microphone use for the bar indicator.
Device security is a new read-only readout: Secure Boot, TPM, disk
encryption, SELinux mode, and the firewall. None of these is a
preference -- they are set in firmware, at install time, or by system
policy, and a switch offering to change them would either fail or do
something far-reaching from a control that looks like every other
control. What it answers is "is this machine set up the way I think it
is", which otherwise takes five commands and root. Facts that cannot be
determined report Unknown rather than guessing, because a security
readout that quietly says "fine" when it failed to look is worse than
no readout.
File history and trash retention are deliberately NOT offered as
switches. They are GNOME preferences enforced by gsd-housekeeping, which
does not run in a Hyprland session -- verified, it is not running here.
Toggling them would store a preference, change nothing, and give no sign
of it. They are delegated to GNOME Settings by name instead.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Working towards parity with GNOME Settings, which splits pointing
devices into their own panel. Panama had pointer speed and focus-follows
buried under a page called "Input & Shortcuts", and had nothing at all
for scroll direction, acceleration profile, scroll speed, left-handed
buttons, or any touchpad setting -- all of which could only be changed
by editing hypr/input.lua by hand, which is the thing this app exists to
stop.
Every new mapping was read back off the running compositor rather than
assumed, and two were not what they look like: touchpad drag lock is an
int with three states, not a switch, and scroll factors are floats even
at their default of exactly 1. Getting either wrong makes every write to
that setting look rejected. The shape contract now covers 35 mapped
options, up from 23.
The touchpad card renders only when a touchpad is attached, which is
what InputDevices is for. On a desktop it would be worse than useless:
every switch on it would appear to work, because the preference is
stored and Hyprland accepts an option for a device class it has no
member of, so the settings would silently affect nothing.
Keyboard layout was read-only text, justified by a note saying changes
needed a compositor reload. That is not true in 0.56.2 -- setting
input:kb_variant through hl.config re-keymaps attached keyboards
immediately, verified by watching active_keymap on a real keyboard
change to "English (US, intl., with dead keys)" and back. So layout,
variant, and options are now real controls, joined by a TextEntryRow
that commits on Enter or focus loss rather than per keystroke, since
half a layout name is a valid string meaning something else.
Rejected input is shown as rejected rather than sanitised: these strings
are serialised into an hl.config payload, where stripping an unexpected
character would turn a typo into a different working setting.
Verified each new pointer option applies and reverts against the live
compositor. Schema, search, commit/reset, and system contracts pass.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Wires the schema entries and routing the codex agent needs for default
applications, weather, vitals refresh, notification timing, and capture,
so its pages can be written against keys that already exist.
Capture directories and encoder arguments are enums rather than free
text. Both are handed to a recorder process, and a settings page has no
reason to expose an arbitrary string there.
ApplicationsPage.qml is a placeholder so the page id can be routed,
registered, and searchable before the real page lands. It is owned by
the other agent and expected to be replaced wholesale.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Continues the settings expansion toward replacing GNOME Settings for
everything Panama actually owns.
Wallpaper. A thumbnail grid rather than a path field: the value of this
setting is the picture, so typing a path to something you cannot see is
the worst version of it. Two things about hyprpaper 0.8 shaped this. Its
IPC is much smaller than older documentation suggests -- preload,
listloaded, unload, and reload all answer "invalid hyprpaper request",
so setting is a single call with no preload. And the "<empty>,<path>"
form that used to mean every output is silently ignored, so a wallpaper
set that way appears to succeed and never changes; outputs are walked
explicitly instead. hyprpaper.conf lives in the repo through the
~/.config/hypr symlink and so cannot hold machine state, which is why
the choice lives in the shared settings store and is re-applied at
startup.
Power & Lock. hypridle has no IPC for reconfiguration and its config is
hyprlang rather than the shared JSON, so scripts/panama-idle generates a
config from the settings store and restarts the daemon. The generated
file lives under XDG_STATE_HOME for the same symlink reason, with a
systemd drop-in pointing hypridle at it. Management is a real state and
the page says which one you are in rather than showing sliders that
quietly do nothing. Zero means never for all three timers, which a naive
template would render as "immediately".
Date & Time. Deliberately not stored in Panama's settings: the timezone
and network time belong to the machine and are shared with sessions that
never see this file. Storing a copy would create a second answer to a
question the system already answers. Reads and writes timedatectl
directly; a cancelled polkit prompt surfaces as an error rather than as
a value that appears to have been accepted.
Accessibility. Pointer size and text scale have to agree across three
consumers with no shared configuration -- the compositor, GTK, and the
shell -- so the store is the source of truth and the values are pushed
outward to gsettings and hyprctl setcursor.
Search now indexes the schema instead of the twelve page labels. "gaps",
"wallpaper", and "screenshot" previously found nothing on an app that
has all three, which is the clearest way a settings app feels smaller
than it is. Shortcuts are indexed by what they do. A contract asserts
every non-internal schema label is reachable, so a new setting cannot be
added in an undiscoverable state.
The GNOME delegation allow-list was widened to the panel names
gnome-control-center actually reports; the previous list contained
"users", which is not one of them and so opened nothing.
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