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
Appearance now opens on Themes: light and dark side by side, each
remembering its own choice, over galleries of ten shipped themes —
Tokyo Moon and Day joined by Moon Rose, Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox and
Everforest in both modes. A theme is a complete palette: the catalog
lives in themes.json, Theme.qml reads every color token from the
active record, and one render pipeline carries it to kitty, tmux,
btop, GTK, Vicinae, Firefox's chrome, and the lock screen. The Theme
editor builds new ones from four wells — wheel, hex, or eyedropper —
with derived surfaces, a saturation slider, debounced fine-tune, and
effects that save with the theme. Custom edits finally keep GNOME's
accent, kitty's border, and hyprlock in sync.
Wallpapers can be video: mpvpaper per output, hardware-decoded, muted
and looped, supervised and respawned. Panama owns the pausing — games,
battery, and a bar pill for right now — because the compositor
rebuilds full-screen blur for every frame a video wallpaper draws.
The lock screen gets a still frame.
Titlebars stop lying. GNOME apps get close-only on your chosen side,
the maximize and double-click settings are gone, the Settings window
obeys the same rules, and its titlebar can be turned off entirely.
Typography becomes five labeled dropdowns instead of a wall of
samples.
Contracts updated and written throughout (165 now); per the redesign
workflow none were executed — the full sweep runs once at the end.
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
Making the plain application keys focus an existing window was the
wrong call. It reads well in a demo and it is what macOS does, but it
made "give me another terminal" the awkward case -- and on a tiling
desktop a second terminal beside the first is the normal way to work,
not an edge case. Reaching for the launcher to open a second file
manager is not an improvement on anything.
So the plain keys do what they always did, and SUPER+ALT is the new
capability rather than a tax on the old one: go to the terminal,
editor, browser, files, calculator or mail you already have, wherever
it is, and start one only if there is none.
ALT rather than SHIFT because SUPER+SHIFT is already the
window-manipulation space -- Files, Neovim and Settings would have
collided with Focus session, Taller and Shorter, and breaking two keys
out of the eight-key resize set to make room is the worse trade.
Also fixes a real trap found while using it. The Alt-Tab overlay
commits on SUPER release, which is a compositor bind running an IPC
call; if that call ever fails to land, the overlay stayed up with no
keyboard focus, no Escape handler and nothing clickable, so the only
way out was an IPC call typed into a terminal it was covering. Clicking
outside now dismisses it, clicking a row switches to that window --
which is the obvious thing to try and did nothing -- and an abandoned
switch closes itself after ten seconds. Keyboard focus still stays with
the compositor, because taking it mid-switch is what would break
stepping.
docs/ is engineering artifacts -- design specs, plans, an upstream
ledger -- and none of it is written for the person who has to live
here. Five chapters that are: coming from another desktop, the
keyboard, windows and workspaces, when something breaks, and making it
yours.
Rendered inside Settings rather than opened in a browser, so a chapter
that says "the Displays page reverts after fifteen seconds" is one
click from the Displays page. Qt's markdown renderer does the work;
one chapter per Text, because Text has an implicit texture size limit
and a document long enough to hit it goes blank rather than
complaining.
The chapters live beside the shell in manual/ rather than at the
repository root, which departs from the plan. The reason is the path:
the shell finds them through Quickshell.shellDir, which is correct
wherever the repository is, whereas walking upward out of the shell
directory is only correct by accident. The contract fails that pattern
if it comes back.
The contract also pins the set both ways -- every chapter listed
exists, every chapter that exists is listed -- because a renamed file
shows an error card where a chapter should be, which reads as a broken
manual rather than as a moved file.
Gabriel Brown