Commit Graph
207 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Gabriel Brown 8d66247b7c Open a new one with SUPER, go to the old one with SUPER+ALT
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.
2026-08-22 07:22:09 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 05fd5346db Turn a website into an application, and notice the charger
Two of Section E's small wins.

panama-webapp gives a site its own icon, its own window with no browser
chrome, and its own launcher entry, which is most of what "installed"
means in practice and what both macOS and Windows now ship. It scrapes
the site's apple-touch-icon, falls back twice, and never fails an
install over a favicon: a web app with a generic icon still works.
Names are slugged, so "../../../../tmp/pwn" lands inside the
applications directory as tmp-pwn rather than anywhere else, and
remove refuses anything without the marker it writes -- sharing a name
with a real application must not delete that application. A browser
that cannot do app mode is told so rather than handed something that
opens an ordinary window and pretends.

The charger now announces itself through StatusEvents, which was
already the right layer and only wanted a producer. Ambient priority,
so Do Not Disturb quiets it, because a charger is exactly what DND is
for. A critically low battery is published at a priority DND does not
silence, because the one message you must not miss is the one saying
the machine is about to stop. Both join the existing silent-startup
window rather than announcing the state they found.

The keyboard-layout toast the plan also listed is deliberately not
built. Hyprland exposes the active keymap but not a change event
Quickshell already consumes, so it would need either polling or new
event plumbing, and this machine has one layout and could not test it.
2026-08-22 06:33:19 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 333ab9f6b7 Press the browser key twice, get one browser
The application keys ran their command unconditionally, so pressing the
browser key twice gave you two browsers. That is the single most common
"Linux feels wrong" moment and it is a twenty-line fix: match the
window class, focus it if it is there, launch if it is not.

Two details the obvious version gets wrong. Patterns are anchored,
because an unanchored "mail" matches gmail-notifier and the mail key
would raise somebody's notifier. And class alone is not enough here:
the terminal and the editor are both kitty, so the editor bind narrows
by title or it raises whatever terminal happened to be open. The
contract's fixture contains both traps.

Found and fixed a bug this shipped with earlier today. Hyprland 0.56
dispatches through Lua, so `hyprctl dispatch focuswindow address:0x...`
is parsed as Lua source and fails with a syntax error -- which is what
the launcher's Switch Window command had been doing since it landed.
Its own contract stubbed hyprctl and recorded the arguments, so the
call looked correct and never ran. Both now use the selector form
hl.focus actually accepts, and the contract asserts the shape rather
than only that something was dispatched.
2026-08-22 06:02:47 -04:00
Gabriel Brown e1a04d2d70 Write the eight accents down once
They were written down five times: ThemeProfileModel.js for QML,
looks.lua for the compositor, and again in panama-theme-apps and
panama-lock. The GNOME accent-name mapping was a sixth list. Adding a
ninth accent meant editing all of them, and the file most likely to be
missed was the lock screen, which fails silently -- the machine locks
in last season's colour and nothing says why. panama-theme-apps
admitted it in a comment: "there is no shared source between QML and a
shell script".

config/palette.json is that source now. looks.lua reads it through a
new prefs.readJson, which uses the same never-raise parser the settings
store uses, so an unreadable palette costs the accent colours and never
the compositor config. The two shell generators read it through
scripts/panama-palette, which also carries the hex-to-rgb conversion
hyprlock needs and the GNOME member lookup.

QML keeps its table, because a .js module imported into QML cannot read
a file. That is still a copy, so the palette contract compares the two
value by value -- every accent, every field -- and fails on any
disagreement. Verified by planting a wrong hex and watching it name the
exact field.

The adwaita contract used to check the shell's own copy of the GNOME
mapping. It now checks that the shell resolves through the palette, and
fails if that copy ever grows back.
2026-08-22 05:42:53 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 202b5b89ac Write the manual for the person using the desktop
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.
2026-08-22 01:11:46 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 9202697734 Introduce the desktop to somebody who has just met it
Thirty settings pages is the opposite of the usual problem: a person
arriving from GNOME, macOS or Windows cannot tell which few things
matter. This is those few, once, on the first start.

Not a tour. Nobody reads a tour, and a multi-step wizard on a desktop
somebody just installed is one more thing between them and using it.
One card, five keys, and a way out.

The chords come from the live keymap rather than being written here, so
a machine whose owner has already rebound something teaches what they
actually have. A welcome screen is the one surface read by somebody
with no way to tell it is wrong, which is exactly why it must not be.

Two deliberate departures from how every other surface behaves. It does
not close on a click outside, because a stray click in the first thirty
seconds would throw away the only explanation on offer. And dismissing
by any route marks it seen, Escape included, because a desktop that
reintroduces itself every login has failed to take no for an answer.
It stays reachable from the launcher afterwards, since the moment
somebody wants it again is exactly when a one-shot has thrown it away.

Also teaches the keymap to spell punctuation: slash, period, comma and
the rest were rendering as their raw keysym names, so the welcome
screen offered "Super + slash" and the cheatsheet agreed with it.
2026-08-22 01:00:18 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 9fbbdd902b Answer "what can I press" in one keypress
The Shortcuts settings page answers "how do I change this", which is
worth opening a window for. This answers the other question, the one
you have with your hands already on the keyboard, so it is an overlay
on SUPER + / and the same key closes it.

It reads Keybinds.grouped() rather than a written-down list, so a
shortcut rebound in Settings shows its new chord here with nothing kept
in sync. A cheatsheet that lies is worse than none: it gets consulted
exactly when somebody does not already know.

Three columns, balanced by how many shortcuts each category holds. The
first attempt used a Flow, which wraps into as many columns as it likes
and made 120 binds across six uneven categories unreadable; it also
sized the card from a child that filled it, which is a circular binding
and produced a card taller than the display with its contents running
off the bottom. Both were found by looking at it rather than by a test,
which is the argument for looking at it.

Fixes a real bug on the way past: luaChord and formatChord appended the
key unconditionally, so the window switcher's modifier-only release
bind became "SUPER + " with a dangling separator. That matched neither
the chord keybinds.lua binds nor the one an override is keyed by, so
that bind could never be rebound and had no category -- it was sitting
in a seventh group of its own, which is how it was noticed.
2026-08-21 23:53:50 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 317b7a0962 Give a reconnected display the arrangement it had
hypr/monitors.lua applies the stored per-output entries when the
compositor reads its config, and never again. A monitor plugged in an
hour later got the compositor's automatic placement instead of the
position, scale and rotation this machine was told to use, and the
only way back was to open Settings and apply it again. Docking should
not cost you your desk.

Deliberately not a confirmed transaction. applyLayout arms a fifteen
second countdown because it is about to show you something you might
not be able to undo; this restores a layout you already confirmed, on
hardware you already had, and a countdown would be asking you to
re-approve your own decision every time you sat down.

It refuses rather than guesses when the stored mode is one the
connected panel does not offer -- DP-1 on one dock is not DP-1 on
another -- and when the surviving layout would name no primary. Both
land on the compositor's automatic placement plus a toast that opens
the Displays page, which is recoverable; silence would not be. That
toast needed a new open-settings verb in StatusEvents, whose page name
goes through ShellState's existing allow-list.

The decision is split from the action as plannedRestore so it can be
tested without driving a real compositor, and the harness sets topology
and stored arrangement in one call because a real query landing between
two would replace the fixture. Both fixtures travel base64: qs ipc call
splits a JSON array of several objects into one argument per object,
so a two-monitor fixture was arriving as an extra argument.
2026-08-21 23:06:50 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 3c359f3f7e Notice the battery, and the machine it is or is not in
Panama had no idea whether it was running on a laptop. No upower, no
battery, no lid, no AC: hypridle.conf says "This is a desktop" in its
own header, and that was true of the code as well as the machine.

panama-hw answers hardware questions one at a time, exits 0 or 1, and
prints nothing, so scripts, services and contracts all ask the same
way. The definition the rest of the laptop work hangs on is one line:
clamshell is lid-closed AND an external monitor. A machine with no
mains supply at all reports as being on wall power, because a desktop
cannot run out of it.

The battery service follows Vitals: sysfs through FileView, an
availability flag, and no subprocess on the timer. Globbing is the one
thing QML cannot do -- a battery is BAT0 or BAT1 or CMB0, mains is AC
or ADP1 or ACAD -- so panama-battery resolves the names once and the
shell reads the files directly after. Nothing falls back to a
plausible zero: a desktop shows no indicator, no card, and no charge
limit control where the firmware has no ceiling.

Also repairs two contracts that were already failing and had not been
noticed, because only the full suite runs them. The dependency
scanner treated line-initial variable assignments, case labels,
comments and heredoc bodies as commands, and `count`, `host`, `cancel`
and `import` are all real binaries on Fedora, so `command -v` could
not filter them out. It now drops comments and heredoc bodies and
requires a command to be followed by whitespace. Verified it still
catches a genuinely undeclared dependency rather than passing quietly.
The launcher command contract had not been told about the fourteen
commands added earlier today.
2026-08-21 21:43:14 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 32bebc2b07 One door per name on the IPC bus
A second IpcHandler with an already-used target does not error -- it
silently shadows the first, and for the polkit target that means the
agent's authentication requests stop reaching the prompt: every
password dialog on the desktop, gone without a message. That duplicate
nearly shipped once, because the handlers live scattered through a
long shell.qml. The contract pairs every IpcHandler with its quoted
target across the shell's QML (harnesses excluded -- each is its own
root), fails on any name declared twice, and refuses to pass on an
empty scan so a declaration-format change cannot quietly blind it.
2026-08-21 20:02:25 -04:00
Gabriel Brown f42b3cfe0e Let the password prompt say why
panama-sudo is pkexec with a stated reason: the reason travels to the
shell over the existing polkit IPC target, and the prompt renders it
labeled "Stated reason (unverified)" beside polkitd's real action
message -- beside, never instead of, because any process can claim any
reason and the action text is the trust anchor. Reasons are single-shot
and expire in ten seconds, so a stale one cannot dress up an unrelated
prompt; without a reason, a running shell, or qs the wrapper is exactly
pkexec. Built for agents, so the person typing their password learns
what for. Verified live end to end -- reason shown, consumed once,
expired when stale, cleared on dismissal -- and pinned by the polkit
reason contract.
2026-08-21 18:57:26 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 9f563c8f94 Configure the Kuycon by what it is, not where it is plugged in
The panel's 4500x3000 mode, 1.5 scale, and 10-bit request were a rule
for connector DP-2 outright, which handed them to whatever monitor a
stranger's machine had on its most common DisplayPort connector. The
rule is now matched by description, the per-output prefs loop covers
every connector including DP-2, and the displays contract pins the
policy to the description rather than the port.
2026-08-21 17:43:33 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 86825e7327 Judge the document portal by its mount, not by its service
No flatpak would launch. Every one of them failed in bwrap with "Can't find
source path /run/user/1000/doc/by-app/<id>", because xdg-document-portal's fuse
mount was gone -- /run/user/1000/doc was a plain empty directory. That mount is
bound into every sandbox bwrap builds, so losing it takes out all 34 flatpaks at
once, never a subset.

It had been gone for three days. The shipped unit is Type=dbus with Restart=no,
so nothing retries it on failure: after it exited 21 it came back only because a
flatpak called its bus name two seconds later, and that activation landed on the
dying instance's mountpoint and came up with no mount at all. systemctl reports
active (running) either way -- the fusermount3 helper is still sitting there as a
child, in this case for two and a half days without ever completing the mount.

Nothing running notices, which is what makes it so quiet. A sandbox needs the
mount only while it is being constructed, so everything already open keeps
working and the symptom arrives whenever you next open a flatpak you had not
opened yet. Here that was three days later, and it presented as "gearlever is
missing" -- an application that was installed, healthy, and entirely innocent.

Two changes, because there are two failures: it does not recover, and nothing
says so.

The drop-in clears the mountpoint before each start, so an activation that
follows a crash lands on clean ground. ExecStartPre rather than ExecStopPost
precisely because nothing restarts this unit -- the next start is whenever
something next wants it, and that is the moment that has to be safe. `-` because
a clean start has nothing to unmount and fusermount3 exits 1 saying so.
/etc/systemd/user rather than a per-user drop-in so it covers every account, and
change-settings reloads the user manager so it applies without a re-login.

The check asks the mount table whether $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/doc is mounted
fuse.portal. Deliberately not a service probe, and deliberately not folded into
desktop.portals: that one asks about xdg-desktop-portal, a different service
which was up and healthy throughout. Service state is exactly the question that
lied here, so asking it again in a new place would have been no check at all.
Warning carries a restart repair, verified end to end rather than assumed.

The mount table is injectable, like every other path this script reads, so the
contract covers unmounted, wrong-filesystem-at-the-right-path, and unreadable
against written fixtures rather than against whatever /proc happens to say --
coupling the test to this machine's live flatpak state is the same mistake in
miniature. Stubbing the check to always return ok fails the contract, which was
confirmed rather than hoped.

What is not fixed is the crash itself: one occurrence, and restarting the
service to get the desktop working destroyed the evidence. The exit was 21, it
landed 21 seconds after xdg-desktop-portal restarted, and that is one sample and
not a theory. What this buys is that the next one is a two-second blip the
doctor names, rather than three silent days.

Second time for this bug. ac231ee found the same dead mount in August while
chasing "can't open Bitwarden", fixed it by hand, and recorded it as "not a
config issue, so nothing to commit there". That judgement is why it was paid for
twice, and it is the part most worth writing down.
2026-08-21 15:26:20 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 185d7edaa5 Open the windows you open together, together
Arrange the desktop, run "Save Layout as Project" from the launcher, name it.
"Open Project" lays it out again on free workspaces, so it never lands on top of
what you are already doing. Saved layouts are listed on the Desktop settings
page, which is where they are removed.

Recorded rather than written by hand, and a terminal's directory is most of why
it is worth having: without it a project opens three terminals in your home
folder and you change directory three times. This machine had two terminals in
the same project when it was written, and reopening there is the difference
between a layout and a working desktop.

Four things had to be found by running it, none of which reading would have
shown.

A terminal's directory is not the terminal's working directory -- that is where
it was launched from. The shell inside it is what has been cd'd. Reading the
wrong one looked correct for exactly as long as the terminals under test had
been started from the right place, which they had.

gtk-launch cannot place a window. It activates over D-Bus, so the process
Hyprland started exits and a [workspace N silent] rule has nothing left to apply
to; Nautilus landed on whatever workspace was in front of you. The Exec line
from the desktop entry is run directly instead. But DBusActivatable
applications do the same thing regardless, so the window is found afterwards and
moved by address -- which also means a window that never appeared is reported
rather than assumed.

/proc/PID/task/PID/children is a file of pids, not a directory. Listing it as
one always raised, so the fast path was never once taken and everything went
through pgrep.

And kitty's --directory needs an equals sign or the short -d; the
space-separated long form is accepted and silently ignored.

The contract exercises a save and open round trip against a stubbed compositor,
and reads a terminal's directory out of a real process tree rather than grepping
the source for a shell name -- an earlier version passed against a helper that
had been changed back, because the constant was still there.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-21 13:45:16 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 538c0a887c Save things where the rest of the software already saves them
Screenshots and recordings offered three folders to choose between, and three
guesses cannot include the folder somebody's other software already writes to --
which is the only folder that matters. This machine has had ~/Pictures/Screenshots
and ~/Videos/Screencasts since long before Panama, and Panama was writing
recordings to a Videos/Recordings it invented. Both are free text now, and the
recording default is the folder that was already there.

Wallpapers were swept from four directories at once, so the distribution's stock
images arrived mixed in with the user's own and there was no way to ask for just
one. Where wallpapers live is something somebody knows about their own machine.
It is a setting, not a search.

All three accept an absolute path as well as one relative to home, which meant
fixing Capture: it prefixed $HOME unconditionally, so naming /mnt/captures would
have written screenshots to ~/mnt/captures and left nobody able to find them.

The generator turned out to skip any entry whose comment sits inside the braces
rather than above them -- it looks for `key:` immediately after `{`. Three
settings were invisible in the reference because of it, one of them dockScreens,
which has never appeared there at all. The staleness contract could not see it
either: regenerating reproduced the same omission, so the copy was current and
incomplete at once. It now counts what was declared against what it could read
and refuses rather than quietly documenting less than exists.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-21 12:57:47 -04:00
Gabriel Brown b280bd02d7 Let the Home Assistant contract skip a server that is not there
It already meant to skip when no token was configured, and could not: the helper
exits 2 for any catalog it cannot complete, so `set -e` aborted at the capture
before the skip was reached. The contract failed with no output at all, which
reads as a crash rather than as a skip, and the branch written to prevent that
had never once run.

So the status is taken deliberately, and there are now two skips rather than
one. No token is not a defect in Panama. Neither is a bridge that does not
answer -- off the network, VPN down, the server asleep -- which is the same
reasoning the extras contract already uses for dnf and Flathub being
unreachable.

Only "unreachable" skips, which the helper raises exclusively for a timeout or a
socket error. A bridge that answers and refuses still fails: authentication
rejected, a bad response, a catalog of the wrong shape. Those are what this
contract is for, and all seven paths were exercised against a stubbed helper to
confirm which fail and which do not.

129 contracts pass, with none of them red for a reason nobody intends to fix --
which was the point. A suite expected to be red stops being read.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-21 02:56:24 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 9092a80f66 Search from the launcher, and give the touchpad something to do
Four things a Hyprland desktop can do that this one was not.

Searching from the launcher needed no launcher work at all: Vicinae already
models it, so this is a script command with one percent-encoded argument. Make
it the fallback command and anything typed that matches nothing else offers to
search it. Bangs come free -- they are a property of where the query is sent,
not of the launcher -- so !yt reaches YouTube without a line of bang parsing.

Suggestions could not be a script command. They need a view that reacts as you
type, which is an extension: TypeScript, compiled, querying the same endpoint
Firefox's address bar uses. It debounces, and aborts the request in flight on
every keystroke -- typing is faster than the network, and an older answer
landing after a newer one leaves the list describing a query that is no longer
on screen. A bang skips suggestions entirely, because Google has no useful
guesses about "!yt".

The engine is now written down twice, once in each. The contract pins that they
agree, since searching from the fallback and searching from the suggestions
reaching different places is the kind of wrong that looks fine.

Gestures mirror GNOME: three fingers sideways for workspaces, up for the
overview, down to dismiss it. Open and close rather than toggle both ways --
toggling means swiping up from an open overview closes it, which is not what the
fingers meant. Hyprland reads gesture registrations at startup so they cannot be
a setting, but distance and direction can be, and are.

Window swallowing is off by default and a preference like every other misc
setting here. A terminal that vanishes when you did not ask for it is confusing
rather than broken, which is worse.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-21 01:49:29 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 725e274ef4 Install the Node this shell config has always assumed
config/bash/shell sources /etc/profile.d/nvm.sh, switches Node per project from
.nvmrc, and puts PNPM_HOME on PATH. None of it worked on a fresh machine. nvm
was never installed -- it is a Terra package, present here since before Panama
-- and the source was unconditional, so every shell on a new box opened with an
error before it got as far as failing to find nvm.

That is the second instance of the same bug. $HOME/.cargo/env was the first, and
fixing it one file at a time is why this one survived: the dependency contract
scanned setup/scripts, bin and the quickshell helpers, but never config/bash --
the one place in this repository whose entire job is to name tools and source
the files that provide them.

So it scans it now, and checks the shape rather than the instance: a literal
path sourced without testing it exists is a finding, wherever it appears. It
found the nvm line, and authselect behind the fingerprint aliases.

Node and pnpm move to nvm with it. They were declared as dnf packages while the
machine ran them from ~/.nvm, which is not a preference so much as a
contradiction -- a system Node earlier on PATH wins every `nvm use`, so the
per-project switching this shell config sets up could never have worked. nvm
install --lts, then pnpm inside it, so pnpm travels with the Node version it
belongs to instead of outliving it.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-21 00:30:48 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 6016efa436 Meet main where it has moved since this branch was written
The rebase itself is the previous five commits replayed onto main; this is what
they needed once they landed there, kept separate so the replay stays readable.

The shell did not start. A Column in this branch's notification settings menu
assigned its own implicitWidth and implicitHeight, which a Qt 6 positioner
computes and does not let you set. That took out every contract that launches a
shell -- six of the seven failures were this one line, and none of them said so
until the error was read to the bottom. A Column already measures itself from its
children, so the bindings are simply gone.

Three assertions pinned an implementation main has since replaced, and each is
updated to pin the intent rather than the mechanism:

  - The display picker now reads primaryFirstMonitors, which is monitors sorted
    with the primary first. Still populated from what is connected, which is what
    the contract is for; the sorted list is the point, so the picker opens on the
    display somebody is most likely to mean. This branch made that change and
    broke its own contract without noticing.
  - The accent swatches come from the accentName schema rather than
    Object.keys(Theme.accents). Same swatches, same order, one source shared with
    every other enum row.
  - The OSD used to take no pointer input at all. It takes some now, because this
    branch's own design calls for a secondary click on a visible OSD to open its
    settings, and a Wayland input region cannot admit one button and refuse
    another. The rule that survives is that the region stays bounded to the OSD's
    own card: it floats over other windows for a couple of seconds, and a region
    bigger than the card would swallow clicks meant for something underneath.

Theme's accent table moved to ThemeProfiles, which is this branch's point -- a
curated accent and a custom profile become the same kind of record. main had
meanwhile given each accent a `gnome` member, the nearest name in GNOME's fixed
accent-color enum, which is what makes libadwaita applications recolor instead of
staying in GNOME blue. That member moved into the curated table rather than being
dropped, and adwaita-accent-contract now reads it where it lives.

Where main had simply moved further along the same path, main won: the focused
border driven by the chosen accent rather than a hardcoded pair, the gradient
built through the shared serializer rather than a hand-rolled string, the
multi-edge dock geometry. This branch's context menu, keyboard focus and
accessibility work sit on top of those rather than beside them.

Three new contracts arrived carrying .sh and lost it, along with the references
in this branch's own plan.

124 contracts pass.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NvgBuSWB5sE43yWmg21ozj
2026-08-20 22:23:27 -04:00
Gabriel Brown ed428e87c4 Complete the Panama theme system 2026-08-20 22:03:08 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 69ecec7ecf Complete contextual desktop controls 2026-08-20 22:00:53 -04:00
Gabriel Brown a90f6eb357 Fix wallpaper scan cap exit status 2026-08-20 22:00:26 -04:00
Gabriel Brown c4642919f7 Close desktop safety gaps 2026-08-20 22:00:26 -04:00
Gabriel Brown e1faaf7a76 Drop the extension, and give the test suite a front door
Phase 6, the last of the fresh-install spec.

159 scripts lose their .sh: 110 contracts, 47 Vicinae commands, 2 compositor
contracts. A shebang and the executable bit already select the interpreter. The
extension only ever added something that had to stay in sync, and the rename
proved the point twice over in the space of an hour.

The spec's stated risk was Vicinae's script discovery. One script was renamed and
reloaded on its own before the other 46 followed; it came back as
scripts:panama.capture and all 47 resolve. What the probe turned up instead is
that the extension was never only a filename: Vicinae's command IDs embed it, so
every ID changed. Nothing in this repository refers to them, so nothing breaks.
The only trace is Vicinae's metadata.json, whose visited map had two Panama
entries that are now orphaned -- two commands lost their usage ranking and will
earn it back. Worth knowing before anyone renames these again on a machine that
has a keybind pointing at one.

Rewriting the references by exact filename missed two things it structurally
could not see: a name built from a variable, settings-$page.sh, and a glob,
-name '*.sh'. Both were in the contract that counts the generated commands, which
promptly reported 47 expected and 0 found. The mechanical part of a rename is the
part that looks finished.

The three subcommands. panama doctor fronts a health check that already existed
and already ran at the end of every install but could not be reached from a
terminal. panama upgrade re-runs the installer from anywhere. panama test runs
the suite, which had no entry point at all -- 121 files that were the main safety
net in this repository and were invisible in it.

Writing that runner found three tests nothing was running.
calendar_agenda_bridge_test, home_assistant_bridge_test and kdeconnect_bridge_test
are unittest suites without the executable bit, so no contract invoked them and
the first draft of the runner skipped them silently. All three pass, and have
passed unobserved for weeks. The runner collects *_test.py as well now, because a
runner with a blind spot is worse than no runner for the same reason a dependency
checker with one is: it reports PASS.

Six worktrees pruned. Each was re-checked rather than trusted to the spec's list,
and two needed it: panama-commands is not on feat/panama-commands but on
feat/gnome-tweaks-parity, and fix/panama-displays-review reads [ahead 3] -- ahead
of its remote, not of main, with every commit patch-equivalent to landed work.
roadmap-completion stays; it has five commits that are genuinely unlanded. The
branches are left alone: pruning a worktree costs nothing, deleting a branch is a
decision.

121 contracts pass.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NvgBuSWB5sE43yWmg21ozj
2026-08-20 21:55:55 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 47f29f9fa9 Stop describing a desktop this repository does not install
Phase 5. The README advertised two desktops that coexist -- GNOME with Forge,
Dash-to-Dock, Openbar and Vitals, alongside Hyprland -- and nothing in setup/
installed or configured any of the first one. Panama configures one desktop, and
now says so.

config/dot/forge is deleted along with its entry in link-dotfiles. It was the
hedge from when the GNOME session was still the fallback and Hyprland was being
built beside it; the hedge has been paid off. Nine files, six of which were
Forge's own editor backups that should never have been committed.

Searching for the rest of GNOME found nothing else to cut, which is recorded in
the spec so nobody goes looking again. change-settings never enabled an
extension. The mentions of Dash-to-Dock, Openbar and Vitals through the shell are
comments saying what a component was modelled on -- which intellihide behaviour
the dock reproduces, where a colour came from -- and DESKTOP-PARITY.md is the
table of what replaced what. That is provenance, and it is the reason those
components behave the way they do. Vitals in services/ is Panama's own bar
service and merely shares a name with the extension it replaced.

The handoff panel list was wrong in two places. It named Wacom, which nothing
hands off to, and Region, which is a subpage of System rather than a panel. The
nine real ones are read off the call sites and the allow-list that gates them.
The spec said it, the comment on gnome-control-center repeated it, and the README
would have made it three.

One test gap turned up and is closed. The assets contract caught a directory
under config/dot/ that nothing links, but not the inverse: a name left in the
dirs array with nothing behind it, which makes link-dotfiles point ~/.config/<name>
at a path that does not exist. Deleting Forge is the exact move that introduces
that, and nothing would have failed if the array entry had been left. A dangling
symlink is worse than a missing one, because everything that looks there finds
something. Verified by putting the entry back and watching it fail.

The audit of docs/settings.md this phase asked for needed nothing: it is generated
from PreferenceSchema.qml, a contract already fails when it goes stale, and it
carries no claim about GNOME or Forge. The README gained the section it was
missing instead -- the 121 contracts under tests/ were the main safety net in this
repository and went entirely unmentioned in it.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NvgBuSWB5sE43yWmg21ozj
2026-08-20 21:33:57 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 359fb922aa Install the four applications this desktop assumed you had
Helium was already declared. Podman Desktop is on Flathub, so it joins the
flatpak list beside the podman it fronts.

RustDesk was the interesting one. panama-doctor has checked `rustdesk.service`
for as long as it has existed, and autostart.lua works around the tray that
service spawns -- so RustDesk was already part of this desktop, installed by
nothing. The flatpak cannot register a root-owned system service, so unattended
access needs the RPM.

Claude Code has no RPM and no flatpak either, so it takes the official installer
and keeps itself updated afterwards.

Neither pins a version. sunhat pinned upscayl 2.11.5, LACT 0.5.4 and a fedora-40
RPM, and every one of those was a 404 within a release cycle; the RustDesk URL is
resolved from whatever the latest release happens to be. Both are skipped when
already present, and a failure is logged and stepped over rather than aborting a
stage that has already installed the desktop.

That leaves three exceptions to the dnf-or-flatpak rule, all named in one place
with a reason each. The dependency contract now knows they are installed out of
band, so probing for them with `command -v` is not read as an undeclared
dependency -- narrowly, per command, so a genuine omission still fails.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-20 19:25:30 -04:00
Gabriel Brown b6448c9876 Give the revealed Dock back the pointer that revealed it
The bottom dock came up when the cursor reached the edge and hid again a
quarter-second later with the cursor still sitting there.

The input region has two shapes: a three-pixel strip along the whole edge while
hidden, and a region over the body once revealed. Teaching the dock about left
and right rewrote both, and the bottom case was folded into the branch that
serves a left dock -- x 0. That is right for a dock that hugs the left edge and
wrong for one that is centred on the bottom: the region landed on the left third
of the screen while the pointer that summoned the dock was in the middle. Hover
dropped on the very frame the dock arrived, and the hide timer did the rest.
Approaching from the far left worked, which is the only reason it looked
intermittent rather than broken.

Bottom is centred, so the region starts where the body starts.

Nothing measured the input region, which is why "bottom is unchanged" passed
while bottom was broken -- the contract read the window and the window was
fine. It now probes the mask in both states on all three edges and asserts the
point a hand actually aims at, the middle of the edge the dock lives on, is
still inside the region after the dock arrives. It fails on the old binding
with the coordinates that were wrong.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NvgBuSWB5sE43yWmg21ozj
2026-08-20 19:23:02 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 15d54b16f6 Ask everything first, then run without needing anybody
sunhat's failure mode was a question twenty minutes into a run. Walking away
from an install meant coming back to a prompt that had been waiting an hour.

So the questions move to the front. A new interview stage asks what Panama needs
to be told -- hostname, git identity, whether to sign in to GitHub, whether to
make an SSH key -- shows the answers back, and asks once to proceed. After that
nothing asks again. gum is bootstrapped before it runs, because the interview is
built on gum and gum arrives with a stage that has not run yet.

Answers reach the stages through a mktemp file that install sources and the
existing trap deletes, since a child process cannot export into its siblings.
They are not remembered between runs: there is no state file to go stale, and
one of the answers is an email address.

The interview asks only what a stage in this repository actually consumes.
Extras, hardware and debloat questions arrive with the stages that act on them
-- a prompt whose answer nothing reads is a control that lies. The new contract
pins that in both directions, and four deliberate mutations confirmed it catches
a question nobody reads, a stage reading something nobody asks, an answers file
left on disk, and a declined interview that fails to stop the run.

The run now ends with panama-doctor, because a failed-stage count says nothing
about a service that did not start. It never changes the exit code: on a fresh
machine, unconfigured is the honest answer, not a failure.

espanso and oh-my-posh stop being exceptions -- Terra packages espanso-wayland
and Fedora packages oh-my-posh, so the curl installer is gone. bun is now the
only remaining one.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-20 19:22:36 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 96e4085919 Install the desktop this repository already describes
The shell named a font, a pointer theme and a wallpaper that no package list
installed and no stage placed. It went unnoticed because this machine collected
all three under sunhat and never lost them; a fresh Fedora box would have come
up with tofu for every shell glyph, the default pointer, and no wallpaper --
while Wallpaper.qml called that missing file `shippedPath`.

The dependency contract reported PASS throughout, because it reads commands that
scripts invoke and none of these are one. The new assets contract covers what it
structurally cannot: fonts and pointer themes named in configs and gsettings, a
shipped wallpaper that must exist, commands launched from QML, and directories
nothing puts into service. Written against the broken tree first, where it found
ten faults.

Four of those were packages nobody had noticed were missing -- gnome-calendar,
podman, pipewire-utils and flatpak -- alongside gnome-control-center, which backs
fifteen rows of Panama's own Settings and is commented so it is not mistaken for
GNOME-session residue later.

Fonts turned out to need no install stage at all. Terra, which install-packages
already enables, packages every Nerd Font, so sunhat's wget-and-unzip is replaced
by five lines in a package list. The pointer theme had no such luck: it is
packaged nowhere, so it is vendored rather than downloaded from a URL that can
rot.

espanso stays undeclared. It is in no enabled repository, and building it from
source is the install method this repository is trying to stop using.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
2026-08-20 18:57:47 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 3b01f1e020 Let the Dock choose an edge, choose its screens, and be dragged into order
Three things that were parked, and the reasons they were parked turned out to be
the useful part of doing them.

The Dock can sit on the left or the right as well as the bottom. Everything that
assumed the bottom edge is now asked which edge it is on: the anchors, the axis
that gets an implicit size, the sliver of input region that survives hiding, the
direction the body slides away in, and which side a tooltip opens towards. The
body was a Row and is a Grid, because one declaration then serves both
orientations -- Row and Column would each need their own children, and the
cross-axis anchors that centre items in a Row are the wrong axis in a Column.

Bottom is unchanged in every particular, and the settings default to it, so a
hot reload in the middle of this work left the running dock exactly where it
was.

One bug worth recording because static review would never have found it: a dock
spans the edge it lives on, which means anchoring BOTH ends of that edge. The
first side dock anchored top and left only, was free to collapse to its implicit
height, and came out one pixel tall. It parsed, it loaded, and it rendered
nothing. The contract measures the geometry rather than reading the source for
that reason, and was verified by putting the single-ended anchor back.

Per-screen is a list of names where empty means every screen, because a list is
what goes stale when a display is unplugged and "all" should not be spelled as
one. Turning off the last screen collapses to "all" rather than leaving no dock
anywhere and no obvious way back.

Pins can be dragged by a grip. The objection this file recorded for a long time
was real -- dragging inside a Flickable inside a scrolling page fails in a way
that reads as breakage -- and the answer is preventStealing on the grip, so the
page cannot claim a gesture that started there. The arrow buttons stay: they are
the keyboard-reachable path and a grip is not. The order is held locally during
the drag and written once on release, rather than rewriting settings.json for
every slot crossed.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 14:10:22 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 23141673a2 Hang the Control Center where every other popover hangs
Five surfaces sat 12 pixels under the bar -- the date menu, the activity panel,
notification toasts, signal glass and the clipboard, all using barGap * 2. The
Control Center sat at 2, through a constant of its own, which left the widest
surface in the shell hanging ten pixels higher than the date menu beside it.

That constant arrived with the original Control Center and carried no reason,
while barGap directly above it explains itself. The clipboard even cites
QuickSettings in a comment for how it derived its own margin, and still landed
on 12. It reads as an early value nothing else converged on rather than a
decision, which is why it is going rather than being documented and kept.

The contract that guarded it pinned the literal, and that same file already
records where pinning a literal led: it once asserted the buggy margin
expression, so the code and the test agreed and a 38-pixel gap was invisible to
both. Replacing one number with another would have repeated it. It now reads the
top margin out of the Control Center and out of the date menu and requires them
to match, so drift in either direction fails -- verified by moving each one in
turn and watching it break.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 13:41:12 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 4cbab01ae2 Show what has actually been installed
Automatic updates leave no other trace. The Flatpak that sat here as "1 update
available" installed itself at 00:14 this morning and nothing on the machine
would have said so.

Both sources are asked in their own machine-readable form and merged on time, so
the answer reads as one history rather than two lists to interleave by eye.

Two parsing traps worth recording next to the code. flatpak's --json prints
timestamps as "Aug 20 08:07:46" with no year in them, so the year is inferred
and a date that would land in the future is read as last year's. And dnf5's
start_time is epoch UTC while its own history table prints that same value as
though it were local -- checked against rpm, and the local rendering here is the
correct one.

The contract asserts entries are newest first, that none is dated in the future,
and that both sources parse; it was verified to fail by breaking the year
inference so every flatpak entry landed tomorrow.

Loaded on demand rather than with the page, because it reads both full
transaction logs.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 11:30:31 -04:00
Gabriel Brown de45f205ad Carry settings between machines by allow-list, not by stripping
panama-settings-backup already snapshots this machine so it can be put back
exactly as it was, arrangement and all. This is the other thing: an export meant
to travel, carrying the preferences that describe taste rather than hardware.

The export is an allow-list read from the preference schema rather than a
deny-list of things to remove. A key added later that happens to hold a token
cannot leak into a file somebody emails to themselves; being wrong in this
direction loses a setting, being wrong the other way publishes a secret. It
earned that immediately -- this machine's store holds an orphaned shadowOffset
from a setting that no longer exists anywhere in the source, and it was left
behind without anyone having to know about it.

Three settings stay: the display arrangement, which is keyed by output names
that mean nothing elsewhere; the last page opened, which is session noise; and
schemaVersion, which belongs to the store rather than to a person. Import is a
merge, so settings a file does not mention are left alone, and it is idempotent.

Two bugs made and caught here, in opposite directions. Validation missed 36
settings because "real" was spelled "float" and enums fell through entirely, so
an out-of-range or nonsense value would have been written straight into the
store. Correcting that then broke numeric enums -- vrrPolicy is an enum of 0..3
and the options were read with a regex that only matched quoted values, so those
settings had no known choices, were declared unverifiable and were refused:
valid settings dropped silently in transit.

The contract could not see the second one. It checked only that bad values are
refused, and when numeric enums were unreadable they never reached the bundle at
all, so every "did it arrive" assertion was satisfied by their absence. It now
requires the export to carry what it should as well as withhold what it should
not, and was verified to fail in both directions.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 11:02:42 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 52e2a83a78 Add an SSH Keys page, and refuse the one control that would lie
The page shows which keys exist, what the agent is holding, and the hosts this
machine has met, with a two-press forget for a host whose key has changed.

Nothing here reads private key material. Fingerprints and comments come from the
.pub file, and "does this key need a passphrase" is answered by asking
ssh-keygen to derive the public half with an empty one -- it succeeds for an
unencrypted key and fails for an encrypted one, and either way the only thing it
can emit is public. The contract checks that against the payload that actually
reaches the page rather than against the source, because what the code intends
and what it ships are different claims.

Unloading a key from the agent is refused, with its reason. On this desktop
`ssh-add -d` prints "Identity removed" and the key is still offered a second
later: gnome-keyring's agent lists every key it finds in ~/.ssh, so a removed
one comes straight back off disk. That was measured rather than assumed -- a
plain ssh-agent removes durably, this one does not -- and a button reporting
success while changing nothing is worse than no button. The page says so and
names the thing that does work: move the file out of ~/.ssh.

SSH_AUTH_SOCK is not set in a normal shell here, so a naive check reports "no
agent" while one is plainly running. The helper falls back to the keyring
socket, and an agent started by hand still wins. That gap is the same one that
made reaching these servers awkward in the first place.

Generating a key is deliberately absent. A passphrase cannot reach ssh-keygen
without going somewhere it should not -- -N puts it in argv, which every process
on the machine can read -- and driving the prompt over a pty did not work.
Offering to generate an unencrypted key instead would be a downgrade dressed as
a feature, so the page does not offer to generate at all.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 10:17:33 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 79b3d5cb85 Close the sweep's last blind spot, and stop shortcuts silently colliding
gapsIn and gapsOut were the only two compositor settings the write sweep had
never verified: Hyprland answers for them in CSS shorthand, "5 5 5 5", and the
sweep had no way to compare that. The preference behind each is a single int
that Hyprland expands to four sides, so a uniform reading compares exactly. A
non-uniform one is not something the preference can express, and is skipped
rather than collapsed to a number it never wrote. 63 of 63 verified live now,
none skipped.

Wallpaper thumbnails are cached. The report that five of them sat at "Loading…"
was a screenshot taken 1.1 seconds after the page opened -- decoding one of
these at tile size takes between 1.2 and 2.6 seconds and about ten start at
once, which the code already said. Measuring it did turn up something real
though: without a cache, scrolling back up pays that decode again for every
tile. The tradeoff is a wallpaper replaced in place showing a stale thumbnail
until restart, which is worth it for a directory of files that are added rather
than edited.

A chord already in use is now named rather than taken: "Super+Q is already
Terminal". Two actions on one chord means whichever Hyprland reads last wins,
which is not a thing to find out later by pressing it. Rebinding a shortcut to
the chord it already holds is correctly not a conflict.

Also: Open Appearance lands on the Windows tab now that the page has tabs,
Storage points at reclaimable container space, and a dock row shows its desktop
id only when two pinned applications share a name -- it is developer text, and
repeating it under fifteen recognisable names made the list harder to scan.

Written down because it cost the shell: QML has no default parameter values, and
`function openSettings(page: string, section: string = "")` fails the entire
configuration rather than the one function -- so the bar and dock went with it,
and 43 contracts failed at once pointing at the same line. qmllint --bare passes
that, which is why the usual check before touching the running shell did not
catch it. openSettingsSection exists as a separate function for that reason.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 09:56:02 -04:00
Gabriel Brown f53ca16392 Make the focus exception list real, or it was a page telling a lie
The mode data model shipped with an allow list and nothing that read it. The
summary would say "2 apps may interrupt" while notification delivery never
consulted the list and no editor could set it. That is the dead row this work
has spent its time removing, introduced by the work itself.

The banner gate consults the mode in force now, and the list can be edited from
the applications that have actually sent a notification -- an exception for
something that never notifies is not a choice worth offering.

Exceptions belong to a mode. allowedApps is empty whenever no mode is active, so
a Do Not Disturb switched on by hand stays absolute and nothing can leak into
it. That scoping is asserted, not just written.

Verifying this took three attempts, and the second was a real defect in the
guard rather than in the code. The contract grep for FocusModes.allows matched
the comment that explains it, so the check passed with the enforcement deleted.
It matches the gate expression now. A guard a comment can satisfy is not a
guard, and this is the third time prose has satisfied one here.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 02:23:30 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 6dc606b872 Give focus modes conditions rather than alarms, and let Gaming hand over
A mode is on because something is true right now: a game is running, a window is
fullscreen on a given display, a workspace is focused, the clock is inside a
window. That is asked again rather than fired once, and it is the whole reason
schedules could be included here without the usual failure modes. A machine
asleep at 23:30, rebooted at 02:00, or opened at 08:00 into a window that has
already passed all reach the right answer by being asked again; an alarm gets
all three wrong.

The midnight-crossing rule is the part worth being careful about: a window
belongs to the day it STARTS on, so a Friday-only 23:30-07:00 covers Saturday
morning and must not cover Saturday night. That arithmetic was tested as pure
logic before anything was built on it, including every malformed input failing
closed -- silencing someone because a time string was wrong is the worst way
this could fail.

This does not take over the manual timed session. FocusSession already owns
that, with its capsule, shortcut, Quick Settings entry and contracts, so modes
defer entirely while one runs. Two writers of Do Not Disturb would each restore
whatever the other happened to leave behind.

Gaming hands over rather than being duplicated. The hook was silencing
notifications itself, which would have made exactly those two owners -- and
Gaming.active only polls while its settings page is open, so a mode could not
have seen a game reliably in any case. The hook reports the game over IPC now
and the mode decides what that means, the Gaming page points at it, and
gamingSilenceNotifications is retired from the schema, since a setting nothing
reads is the dead row this work keeps removing.

Sleep ships disabled. A desktop that starts silencing someone on first boot has
overstepped, whatever the default hour.

Three contracts moved with it. gaming-contract asserted the hook uses setDnd,
which was right before and wrong now; the shell-side assertions that setDnd and
dndState exist stay, because a toggle would flip an already-silent machine back
on. The new contract is proven to fail by breaking the midnight rule and by
letting modes run alongside a manual session.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-20 02:06:50 -04:00
Gabriel Brown f6b970da21 Turn the rows that only reported things into controls
Autostart entries showed "Enabled" or "Disabled" as plain text. The row did
toggle on click the whole time, so this is an affordance rather than a missing
capability -- but a control that reads as static text is one nobody knows they
have. It is a switch now, with removal alongside it behind a confirmation:
disabling writes Hidden=true and can be undone, deleting the file cannot.

remove-autostart is confined to files the autostart directory owns. It resolves
the path and compares the parent, so a name like "../../.bashrc" cannot escape,
and it refuses symlinks rather than following them -- deleting through one would
remove whatever it points at, which is somewhere else and not ours. Each refusal
was tested against a fixture directory, including a symlink aimed at
/etc/hostname, which survived.

Sharing says who is signed in from another machine: user, origin and since when.
An empty list on this machine proves nothing, so the parser was checked against
sample `who` output -- it picks out remote sessions and leaves out local seats
and the :0 display, which would otherwise report the person at the keyboard as a
remote login.

Media sharing was "Available" and nothing else: rygel installed, rygel.service
disabled, no way to change that from here. It is a switch now, and it says what
it does before you touch it rather than afterwards -- turning it on publishes
media folders to every device on the network with no password in front of them.

Per-application camera and microphone permissions come from the portal's
permission store, which is where an application that asked through the portal
has its answer recorded. The page states the limit plainly instead of implying a
protection that does not exist: a program installed outside the portal opens the
device directly and nothing here stands in its way. Anything that is not an
explicit "yes" is treated as withheld, because guessing generously about a
camera is the wrong way to be wrong.

The first version of the write silently did nothing -- SetPermission takes an
array of strings and was being handed one string -- and the test did not notice,
because it discarded the helper's output and only checked that state was
unchanged afterwards, which was trivially true. The contract now requires the
value to move, and was proven to fail by putting that exact bug back.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 23:10:48 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 7e1c85b094 Group the long pages by what you are trying to do
Notifications repeated both lock-screen switch labels for every application, so
twenty apps meant sixty rows of the same two sentences and the page could not be
scanned at all. Each app is one row now, carrying what its switches add up to --
"On, lock screen shows the sender only", "On, hidden on the lock screen",
"Notifications off" -- with the switches behind it, one app open at a time. The
identifier only appears while an app is open, which is the only time it
disambiguates anything, and the content switch dims when the app cannot reach
the lock screen at all, because there it means nothing.

Shortcuts were already grouped; the problem was that "Windows" caught focus,
movement, splitting, resizing and window state alike and held 43 of the 93
binds. A section that long is a list, not a grouping. They are separated by
intent now -- Focus, Move & split, Size, Window state -- and the split was
checked against the binds this machine actually has rather than trusted from the
keywords. Order matters in two places worth naming: "Next window splits down" is
about splitting rather than focus, and "Focus session" is quiet mode bound to a
workspace rather than window focus, so both are settled before the general
checks.

Refresh rate gets its own row. That need was created by collapsing the
resolution list: the rates for a resolution were only ever reachable by opening
it, so changing nothing but the rate meant going through the mode you already
had. It appears only when the current resolution offers more than one.

Default-application rows carry a chevron, having previously opened a chooser
while looking completely inert.

The notification contract asserted the literal Notifs.appRule(app.id).enabled,
which moved when the rows collapsed. The rule is still read through a binding on
Notifs.appRule, so a rule changed elsewhere still reaches the row -- the
assertion now requires that, rather than requiring one particular spelling of
it.

The power profile rows were left alone. A three-way choice in three rows looks
wasteful until you notice each row explains what the profile does, and that page
has empty space to spare; a segmented control would trade information for space
that is not scarce.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 22:54:51 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 0c364f38e6 Stop sending people to GNOME for pages this app already has
Panama absorbed Users, Sharing, Printers and Online Accounts one page at a time.
Each time, the row pointing at GNOME's equivalent stayed exactly where it was --
so an app whose stated purpose is to make GNOME Settings unnecessary shipped four
doors back to it, two of them inside a card headed "these areas remain owned by
Fedora and GNOME's mature system panels".

Nothing failed. Every row worked as written. They were simply no longer true, and
no test could notice, because none of them knew what Panama had come to own in
the meantime. gnome-handoff-contract reads the sidebar for the pages that exist
and the pages for the panels they hand off, and fails on any overlap -- derived
from both sides rather than a hand-kept list, so absorbing the next page cannot
leave a stale door behind. Adding an online account is allow-listed with its
reason: it genuinely requires GOA's own dialog.

health-ui-contract asserted those handoffs were present, which is how they
survived. The assertion is inverted rather than deleted, so reintroducing one
fails loudly.

The Home Assistant "Light entities" box is gone. It was a multi-line list of
comma-separated Zigbee entity IDs, and the light catalog does not come from it --
the helper discovers that live. It is a one-time migration seed for the Control
Center selection, so saving now passes the stored value back untouched: setting a
URL or a token cannot disturb it. Deleting the control naively would have written
an empty list over it.

Sharing showed two "Port" rows for RDP, same label and value, one read-only and
one editable, separated by a switch. The read-only leftover is gone. The SSH port
stays read-only because sshd's port is not ours to write.

About reported "488G free of 1.9T" where Storage said "523 GB free of 2.0 TB" --
the same drive, binary against decimal. About uses decimal now, matching how
drives are sold. Memory and swap stay in GiB, which is how RAM is sold.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 22:36:58 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 1aa1324083 Lead Appearance with light and dark, and stop pages listing whole datasets
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
2026-08-19 22:36:41 -04:00
Gabriel Brown ac5e6e2130 Add a Containers page, grouped by project and led by what is exposed
Every container on this machine is created by rootless podman-compose and
labelled with the project it belongs to, so the grouping is read from the
labels rather than invented. State then decides prominence within that
grouping -- running containers get rows, stopped ones collapse to a line --
which is why neither axis had to be chosen over the other.

Acting on a stack uses plain podman over the labelled set, never
`podman-compose down`, which would remove containers this shell did not
create. The compose file is the source of truth for what exists and belongs
to the repository. Nothing here needs privilege.

The findings on top are the crossing the Firewall page reports, seen from the
side that can close it: the firewall knows only that something is listening,
while this page knows which container, which compose file, and which token is
missing from it. So `bind-local` prepends a loopback address and leaves the
line byte-for-byte -- variables, quoting and style intact -- then re-parses and
rolls back unless exactly those ports moved. It refuses anything ambiguous
rather than guessing. Rewriting the mapping to the port podman reports today
would have deleted the ${POSTGRES_PORT} indirection that makes it
configurable at all.

Unused volumes are read from podman's own dangling filter. The first version
used MountCount, which is a runtime lock counter and not a usage signal: it
reads zero for a volume a running container has mounted this second, so
"remove unused volumes" offered to delete the live Command Center database.
The cross-check against `podman system df` is what exposed it. The contract
reintroduces that bug deliberately and fails if the guard does not catch it,
because a guard nobody has seen fail proves nothing.

Every mutation in the contract runs against a stubbed podman. Nothing in the
suite starts, stops or removes a real container, image or volume.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 20:49:04 -04:00
Gabriel Brown fd99569666 Add a Firewall page, led by what is actually reachable
Listing zones and services is what firewall-cmd already does. The
question it does not answer needs both halves at once: a port is
reachable only when something is LISTENING on a network address AND the
firewall permits it.

On this machine that crossing is the whole story. The rules look
unremarkable -- one zone, three services, a port range -- and what they
mean is that PostgreSQL and Redis, published by rootless containers on
every interface, are reachable by anyone on the network. Neither half
says that alone, which is exactly how a tidy rules list coexists with an
open database. Nothing was misconfigured: Fedora's default zone met
podman's default publish behaviour.

Ephemeral client sockets are excluded. A browser's outbound UDP port is
indistinguishable from a service in ss, and listing twenty of them
buried the two rows that mattered.

Closing the port range names what it would cut off, by service, before
doing it, and removing ssh says so when someone is connected over it.
Rich rules are shown and never edited: a syntax is not a setting, but
hiding it would misrepresent the configuration.

The contract needed a recorded firewall, and the reason is worth
keeping. The rule this page exists for cannot be tested against this
machine -- its zone permits everything above 1024, so "listening" and
"listening and permitted" give identical answers, and a blocked listener
needs a port below 1024, which needs root. With the crossing deleted,
the contract passed. It now runs against a fixture where two listeners
are blocked, and catches it.

Also here: polkit response files are written 0600 rather than at the
default mask, the agent sweeps requests left by an instance that did not
exit cleanly, and the write sweep waits for its harness to be ready
instead of reporting the startup race as settings that failed.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 19:46:16 -04:00
Gabriel Brown a412e3d894 Fix the compositor write contract properly, not by waiting longer
Widening its waits earlier treated the symptom. It still failed about
one run in three, on an idle machine, taking eighteen seconds to do so
-- which was the clue: nothing was in flight to wait for.

SystemSettings verifies each write before storing it and serializes
overlapping ones, so the restore arriving while the previous batch was
still settling was being dropped outright. Waiting longer for a write
that was never queued cannot help. It is issued up to three times now,
and the run where a retry fires visibly takes eight seconds instead of
two.

Retrying cannot hide a broken write path: with the write stubbed out the
contract still reports exactly which policy failed to reach the
compositor.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 19:05:29 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 4cbe3b882a Add a Gaming page, and let the desktop react to games
Live first, because unlike every other page here this one has a live
dimension: card temperature, power draw, whether Game Mode actually
engaged. It polls only while it is open, since a settings page nobody is
looking at has no business waking the CPU.

The part that makes it Panama's page rather than a gamemode config
editor is the hook. gamemode runs a script when a game asks for it and
another when the game exits, so the power profile switches to
performance and notifications go quiet for exactly the duration of a
game -- and afterwards both go back to what they WERE, not to a default.
A Do Not Disturb someone set by hand survives a game; a power profile
someone chose is restored rather than replaced. Verified against real
gamemode activation, not merely by calling the hook.

Two things the page reports rather than hides. Game Mode's headline
trick is switching the CPU governor to performance, and this machine
already runs performance, so it says so instead of implying it helps.
And Proton builds are listed but never chosen: Steam picks the runtime
per game, and a control here would claim an authority this page does not
have.

The hook first called a notifications function that did not exist, and
the one that did was a TOGGLE -- the wrong primitive entirely, since
toggling at game start would unsilence notifications that were already
silent. The shell gained an explicit setter and reader.

search-routing-contract kept its own hand-written list of every page,
which made adding one fail as "not a known page" -- a sixth place to
register a page and a sixth chance to forget. It now derives the mapping
from the shell, which already knows it.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 18:55:10 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 116510caa8 Draw the authentication prompt ourselves
hyprpolkitagent's dialog is compiled into its binary -- no config, no
stylesheet, nothing to theme -- and it was the one window on this
desktop that looked like it belonged to something else.

The split between the two halves is the security design, not an
implementation detail. A small agent process owns the D-Bus side: it
registers with polkitd, receives the request, and hands the shell the
action, the message, who may answer, and a one-time cookie. It never
sees a password. The shell draws the prompt and, on submit, spawns the
setuid polkit-agent-helper-1 itself and writes the password to that
helper's stdin; the helper runs the PAM conversation and reports to
polkitd directly. The password exists in the shell and in the helper's
stdin and nowhere else -- never on a command line, never over D-Bus,
never through IPC arguments.

The prompt takes exclusive keyboard focus, because a password field that
lets keystrokes reach the window behind it is a keylogger with extra
steps. The request travels as a file created 0600 with O_EXCL inside a
0700 runtime directory: a cookie is not a password, but it is a
capability, and capabilities do not belong in a process listing either.

Three things cost real time. polkitd calls back on the same connection
that registered, so exporting the object on the session bus while
registering from the system bus failed every request as "Not authorized"
with no error anywhere. XDG_SESSION_ID is absent in a systemd user unit,
which runs under [email protected] and belongs to no login session, so the
session comes from logind's Display property instead. And PyGObject does
not accept the @ placeholder in variant format strings.

hyprpolkitagent stays installed as the fallback, only one agent is
started, and the comment beside the autostart says how to get the stock
prompt back. Verified end to end, including a real password accepted and
three cancellations refused.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 18:08:52 -04:00
Gabriel Brown b10f8e2593 Stop the compositor write contract failing under load
It passed alone in two seconds and failed in a full suite run at six,
which is the worst way for a test to be wrong: the code was fine and the
report said otherwise.

Each of its waits polls until the compositor reflects a write, and four
seconds was enough on an idle machine and not enough on a busy one. They
are fifteen now. A longer bound cannot mask a dead write, because a
write that never lands never matches -- verified by stubbing the write
path out and watching it still report exactly which policy failed.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 17:33:12 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 8f0fe23377 Add Software Update, across packages, applications and firmware
Three sources that fail independently, so they are counted and applied
separately: a flatpak mirror being down says nothing about whether a
kernel security fix is waiting. Blending them into one number would hide
exactly the case that matters.

Checking costs about nine seconds, which is too long to spend every time
a page opens, so the page opens on the last result and says when it was
taken. A first visit with nothing cached goes and finds out rather than
showing a confident "up to date" it has no basis for.

Installing packages takes a snapshot first, named after what is about to
happen, so Snapshots shows "before 32 package updates" rather than a
timestamp. Best effort: a machine without snapper still updates, because
an update that refuses to run when a nicety fails would be worse than
one without a restore point.

Automatic updates cover applications only, through a Panama-owned user
timer running daily with a randomized delay. Packages still ask, and
dnf-automatic is reported as absent rather than offered, because
installing software is not a settings action.

Health gained a check, and that is where the bug was: it first returned
status "degraded", which is not in the doctor's vocabulary of ok,
warning, error and unconfigured. It was counted as nothing at all while
the summary still said healthy -- the same silent no-op this codebase
keeps relearning. A contract now asserts every status a check can return
is one the doctor counts, and the doctor's own contract knows about the
new check rather than failing on its arrival.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 17:25:11 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 6997dd535f Add high contrast, and make remote desktop configurable
Two of the three panels still handed to GNOME, having actually checked
each rather than repeating that they were not worth owning.

Universal Access turned out to be mostly ours already: the magnifier,
pointer size, text scale, motion and dimming were all present. High
contrast was the real gap. It reaches GTK4 applications through the
desktop portal, which republishes GNOME's accessibility setting as
org.freedesktop.appearance contrast -- so no high-contrast theme is
involved, and none is installed here. Verified end to end: committing
the preference drove gsettings and the portal reported contrast 1.

Sticky, slow and bounce keys stay absent. There is no Wayland or
Hyprland implementation, and the compositor would store the XKB option
while nothing ever acted on it.

Remote desktop gained port, view-only, and clearing stored credentials.
SETTING credentials opens a terminal running grdctl, which prompts for
the password itself. That is not a hand-off for lack of effort: grdctl
takes the password on a terminal and core-dumps without one, and the
only alternative -- passing it as an argument -- would publish it
through /proc to every process on this machine. Typed into grdctl
directly it never passes through Panama, and a contract now fails if it
ever appears on a command line.

Color stays with GNOME, and not for lack of effort either. colord runs
here with seven profiles and zero devices registered, because the
daemons that register displays do not run under this session, and
Hyprland exposes no ICC, gamma, or color-management option at all. A
Color page could import a profile, attach it to nothing, and change
nothing -- the same failure refused for rollback and printer drivers.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 16:42:20 -04:00
Gabriel Brown 1f40f8e136 Add a snapshot manager, and start covering home
The machine already had snapper running hourly on btrfs, so the tool was
never missing. What was missing is that snapper's only configuration
covered / -- and /home is a separate subvolume with no configuration at
all. Six hundred and forty-three snapshots existed and not one of them
contained a document. Anyone reaching for file history would have found
their system and none of their files.

/home now has a configuration on the same hourly timeline, with
deliberately conservative retention: Steam's 1.2 TB lives on that
subvolume and churns on every game update, so keeping five hourly and
seven daily bounds what those updates can pin.

Per volume, because on this machine "one is covered and the important
one is not" was the news, and a timeline opening on system snapshots
would have buried it. Inside a volume the timeline is the familiar view:
points in time, newest first, each openable as a folder tree to take a
file out of.

Restoring sets the current version aside as .before-restore-N rather
than overwriting it. A restore that destroys the thing you were about to
compare against is how someone loses the work they were trying to save.

Rollback is deliberately absent. snapper's rollback changes the btrfs
default subvolume, and this system's fstab pins subvol= explicitly,
which overrides it -- so a rollback would report success and change
nothing after a reboot. A recovery feature that silently does nothing is
worse than not having one, and making it work means editing fstab and
the bootloader, whose failure cannot be repaired from inside the
desktop.

Per-snapshot size is reported as not measured, because measuring it
needs btrfs quotas that cost performance on every write. Free space is
shown instead, which is the number that decides anything.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
2026-08-19 16:11:50 -04:00