Appearance was six cards deep and Light/Dark was the third of them, below the
wallpaper grid and the entire lock screen -- so the control reached most often
was the last one you got to. It is five tabs now, Theme first. The mock showed
four; the page turned out to have eleven cards, so Titlebars and Windows became
Windows, and Clock and vitals became Shell, rather than pretending four would
hold them.
Region, Date & Time and Displays each rendered a complete dataset as rows: every
installed locale, the whole tz database, every mode the monitor advertises. The
chooser was never the problem -- SearchPicker already existed and worked. It was
simply rendered always-expanded, so the one line saying what is currently set sat
under hundreds that were not. PickerRow collapses each behind its current value
and closes again once something is picked.
The avatar never appeared to change because accountsservice writes every picture
to the same path, leaving the URL byte-identical while Qt served its cached
image. cache:false was already set and could not have helped: an unchanged source
is never re-read at all. avatarUrl now carries a revision fragment, bumped only
when a write actually succeeds. Pictures are cropped before they are set, in the
picture's own pixel coordinates so the result does not depend on the size it
happened to be displayed at, and written out at 512x512 through GdkPixbuf --
already a dependency here, so nothing new is required.
Snapshots listed nothing. The timeline and its Delete buttons existed the whole
time, behind a row labelled "Browse...", a word that promises a file browser. The
three most recent points are shown inline now, with the rest one press away.
qmldir-registration-contract exists because an unregistered component is not a
quiet problem: Quickshell fails the entire configuration on it, so the settings
window dies and the bar and dock go with it. That happened twice while writing
this, both times on a machine somebody was using. It is pure file inspection, so
it runs before a change ever reaches the running shell.
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
Phase 4, first slice. Theme.qml hardcoded the Prism pair, so the one
thing that carries every state meaning in the desktop -- focused, active,
on -- was the one thing nobody could change. 74 files read Theme.accent,
so making it a setting moves all of them at once.
Named accents rather than a colour picker, which is the design decision
worth defending. One hex cannot serve both schemes: a colour legible on
the Moon background is usually illegible on the Day one, and a picker
that lets someone build an unreadable desktop is not a feature. So each
name carries a curated pair per scheme, and every one of the sixteen
resulting colours measures at least 3:1 against the ground it sits on --
checked, not assumed. It is also GNOME's model, which is the parity
being chased.
The focused window border comes with it, and only because the ownership
rule made that safe. ColorScheme owns the inactive border as a
scheme-relative contrast role; the focused Prism border is the accent
role owned by the theme. Writing it from the accent would have been
reckless before that boundary existed, since a scheme change would have
erased the user's choice. Both borders are now pushed together, because
each accent carries separate light and dark pairs, so switching schemes
must restate the focused border too.
The gradient is written as a Lua table, not a string. The string form
carries only one stop, and passing two as a string is accepted and
silently keeps the previous value.
Swatches are drawn as the gradient they produce rather than as flat
dots, because the gradient is what is being chosen. Each carries its
name permanently rather than in a tooltip: telling swatches apart by
colour is precisely what someone with a colour vision deficiency cannot
do, which is also why the palette is named in the first place.
Verified end to end by switching to rose and watching the compositor
report eeff757f/eec099ff, then reverting.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Four places in the entire shell could reach Settings. The bar, where a
person looks first, was not one of them -- and Pill has routed
right-click to a secondaryActivated signal all along, which nothing
connected, so the gesture did nothing on every widget in the bar.
Each widget now opens the page that owns its settings: the clock and the
calendar reminder open Date & Time, weather opens Home, the vitals
readout opens Appearance, the status glyphs open Network & Devices, the
media readout opens Sound, and the privacy indicator opens Privacy &
Security. Left-click behaviour is untouched.
Two routing bugs found while picking those destinations, both of the
same kind and both invisible from the code, since each page reads
perfectly well on its own:
weather routed to Appearance while every weather control lives on
Home, so searching "temperature unit" opened a page without it.
vitals routed to Appearance, but the refresh interval sat on Home
while the toggles it governs sat on Appearance -- one concept split
across two pages, which is exactly what the ownership rule forbids.
The interval now sits beside the toggles and Home's stub card is gone.
The jump contract guards the failure mode these share. openSettings()
falls back to Home for an unknown page, sensibly and completely
silently, so a typo or a later rename turns a right-click into "opens
the wrong page" with nothing logged. It also fails a Pill-based bar
widget that leaves right-click unconnected, since that is how the
gesture came to be inert everywhere in the first place.
A third instance of the routing bug is still open: followMouse and
pointerSensitivity sit in the input group, which routes to Keyboard,
while both render on Mouse. Fixing it is a two-line group change in
PreferenceSchema.qml, which codex currently owns, so the contract that
catches all three lands with that fix rather than red.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
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
It is the system settings app for this desktop, so it is named the way
one is. The window is "Settings", the titlebar is "Settings", the
wordmark above the search field is gone, the sidebar's last row is
"About", and the status line reads "Desktop is healthy".
Prose followed the same rule. Forty-odd strings explained what "Panama"
does -- "Panama never animates while idle", "Restore Panama defaults",
"Panama looks in ~/Pictures/Wallpapers" -- which is how a product
describes itself, not how a settings panel describes a setting. They now
say what happens. No user-visible "Panama" remains anywhere in the app.
Two consequences worth naming:
The SUPER+I shortcut's description is user-visible, because the
Shortcuts page is generated from it, so that is renamed too. Rebindings
are keyed by shipped chord rather than description, so no existing
override is orphaned by this.
Three contracts matched the window by title and one matched that
shortcut by description; all four are updated. There are no Hyprland
window rules keyed on the title, so nothing about the window's placement
changes.
The desktop entry is now Name=Settings, but the FILE keeps its
panama-settings name, as does the icon: the dock pins applications by
desktop id, and renaming the file would silently unpin it.
dock-pins-contract covers exactly that.
The dated design docs under docs/superpowers keep the old name. They are
a record of what was decided when, and editing them to agree with the
present would make them lie about the past.
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
The last two values that could only be changed by editing a file.
Weather was pinned to hardcoded coordinates, so the card could not be
pointed anywhere else. It is a location search now, not latitude and
longitude fields: nobody knows their own coordinates, and a control that
demands them is one nobody uses. Open-Meteo's geocoding endpoint needs
no key, the same reason the forecast already uses them. Only the search
term leaves the machine -- the stored place name is a label -- and
coordinates are rounded to four decimals, far finer than a weather
reading resolves and coarse enough to keep a precise home location out
of the settings file.
The graphics readout was hardcoded to card1. This machine has two amdgpu
cards, discrete and integrated, so that was right only by luck, and the
path is meaningless on any other machine. GPUs are enumerated with a
readable name from lspci, since sysfs exposes only numeric ids, and the
picker appears only when there is more than one to choose between. A
stored path the machine does not have is refused and reported rather
than silently measuring nothing.
Also merges the per-application notification rules UI. Its three commits
were believed integrated but the page half was not actually in the tree:
main had the service side in Notifs.qml and zero references to
setAppRule in NotificationsPage. Ancestry is not content.
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
Stage 3 and 4 of docs/superpowers/plans/2026-08-17-panama-cohesion.md.
Add SettingsPage plus ToggleRow, SliderRow, ChoiceRow, ActionRow, and
TextRow. A row names a schema key and needs nothing else: label, detail,
range, and unit come from PreferenceSchema, and writes go through
SystemSettings.commitPreference, which routes compositor-backed keys
through apply-and-verify and local keys straight to the store. The page
scaffold that was copy-pasted eleven times is now one component.
Rebuild Appearance around a live preview of the real desktop, scaled by
the ratio between the preview and the actual monitor so a 10px gap on a
4500px display looks as small as it is. Rebuild Desktop & Dock and Input
& Shortcuts on the shared rows, replacing the read-only text that stood
in for controls that were merely expensive to add.
Generate the shortcut list from hyprctl binds. The page held a
hand-typed nineteen entries against a real keymap of a hundred and
thirteen; it could not show the rest and went stale whenever a bind
changed. Every bind now carries its own description -- backfilled for
the twenty-nine that lacked one -- and keybinds-contract.sh fails if any
bind lacks one, since undescribed binds are dropped from the page.
Make Restore defaults span every store Panama owns. Resetting only the
schema store left the Home accessory arrangement customised while
claiming to restore defaults, which is worse than no reset because it is
silent. Done through HomePreferences' existing public aliases rather
than a new API.
Four defects found while building:
cursor:inactive_timeout is answered by getoption as float, not int. A
wrong readAs does not fail loudly; it makes every write to that key look
rejected, and the user saw an error for a change that worked.
schema-hypr-shape-contract.sh now checks all 23 mapped options against
the running compositor.
The Settings window is tiled, so implicitWidth is only a hint and rows
must survive roughly 400px. SliderRow stacks its control under the label
below 520px.
Binding an anchor to undefined to switch layouts does not reliably
release it. Both row layouts are positioned explicitly.
Concurrent compositor writes are queued and merged rather than refused.
The startup replay of every compositor-backed preference routinely
overlaps a UI change, and refusing left the store and the compositor
disagreeing.
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