Desktop & Dock becomes Shell — Bar, Dock, Control Center, Tiling,
Workspaces — the home for everything Quickshell draws. The settings-
management cluster moves to System as Sync & Backup, Appearance's
Shell tab dissolves, and 24-hour time finally lives on Date & Time,
which always owned it.
The bar gets what it never had: a way to survive the wallpaper. A
second neutral text family (follow theme, or forced light or dark),
a one-layer shadow under every glyph, and a gradient scrim for
wallpapers nothing else survives — all off by default, pixel-identical
until asked. Widgets earn toggles (weather, media, clipboard, calendar
countdown), the vitals cluster stops leaving a dead pill behind, and
Control Center's sections learn to step aside.
The dock graduates from MVP: a context menu with window rows, pin,
unpin, quit and new-window; scroll an icon to cycle its windows; drag
to reorder on the dock itself; hover previews with one-shot captures;
and "Add App to Dock" in the launcher. Three real bugs died en route —
menus that slid away with the autohide, a readonly-property crash on
every menu open, and a drag that drifted half a slot per icon on side
docks. The pinned-apps editor in Settings becomes a drag strip.
166 contracts; the full suite is green except two live display and
switcher tests that cannot run behind a locked session — re-verified
on unlock.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
Home is now Overview | My Home | Phone. Overview leads with quick-action
tiles (focus, Do Not Disturb, health, snapshots, storage), keeps the
findings card — updates fold in, the reclaim-space prompt is gone on
purpose — and adds glance cards, the next calendar event, and weather.
My Home groups every light by Home Assistant area: the helper gained an
`areas` command (one REST template render, no websocket), and the rooms
degrade to a flat list on setups without areas. The favorites editor and
connection card moved intact. Phone gains a vitals strip — battery and
cell signal read from KDE Connect's plugin D-Bus objects, where absence
is data, not an error — beside ring, clipboard, send-a-file, and the
BlueBubbles handoff.
The retired home-phone id resolves to my-home forever via a new alias
map in SettingsRoutes (with a hasOwnProperty guard so prototype names
cannot leak into settingsPage). Storage no longer claims 0 B free — the
old page read a field the disks helper never emitted.
Contracts updated alongside; per the new workflow, the full suite runs
once at the end of the redesign (see the test backlog note).
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
The sidebar was a flat scan of thirty-one rows; now it reads like a
settings app. Multi-subject categories (Input, Network & Sharing,
Applications, Users & Accounts, Privacy & Security, System) carry an
Appearance-style tab strip above the page, drawn by the shell so the
leaf pages themselves are untouched. The taxonomy lives in one new
file, services/SettingsRoutes.qml; the sidebar, the strip, route
validation, search breadcrumbs, and both generators derive from it.
ShellState.settingsPage still holds leaf ids, so every deep link, IPC
call, and search result keeps working — and now lands on the exact
tab. Dictation moves out of Sound onto its own page under Input, with
a handoff back to Sound for the microphone. The strip scrolls when
System's nine tabs outgrow a tiled window. All 161 contracts pass.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
Gabriel Brown