It is the system settings app for this desktop, so it is named the way
one is. The window is "Settings", the titlebar is "Settings", the
wordmark above the search field is gone, the sidebar's last row is
"About", and the status line reads "Desktop is healthy".
Prose followed the same rule. Forty-odd strings explained what "Panama"
does -- "Panama never animates while idle", "Restore Panama defaults",
"Panama looks in ~/Pictures/Wallpapers" -- which is how a product
describes itself, not how a settings panel describes a setting. They now
say what happens. No user-visible "Panama" remains anywhere in the app.
Two consequences worth naming:
The SUPER+I shortcut's description is user-visible, because the
Shortcuts page is generated from it, so that is renamed too. Rebindings
are keyed by shipped chord rather than description, so no existing
override is orphaned by this.
Three contracts matched the window by title and one matched that
shortcut by description; all four are updated. There are no Hyprland
window rules keyed on the title, so nothing about the window's placement
changes.
The desktop entry is now Name=Settings, but the FILE keeps its
panama-settings name, as does the icon: the dock pins applications by
desktop id, and renaming the file would silently unpin it.
dock-pins-contract covers exactly that.
The dated design docs under docs/superpowers keep the old name. They are
a record of what was decided when, and editing them to agree with the
present would make them lie about the past.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
brightnessctl drives the kernel backlight class, which laptop panels
have and this desktop does not -- it reports only keyboard and NIC LEDs.
So BrightnessControl removed itself and there was no way to dim the
screen from Panama at all. DDC/CI is the channel the buttons on a
monitor's bezel drive, and it is the only brightness an external display
has. Both sources now render a row each, so a machine gets whichever it
actually has, or none.
Displays are enumerated from sysfs rather than `ddcutil detect`. The
kernel publishes the connector-to-bus mapping as
/sys/class/drm/<card>-<connector>/ddc along with whether anything is
plugged in, which beats parsing detect's undocumented brief output,
yields the connector name spelled exactly as Hyprland spells it, and
probes only connectors with a monitor attached -- one bus on this
machine rather than fourteen, where each empty bus costs a timeout.
No model name is read: Hyprland already knows what every output is
called, so the UI joins on the connector instead of keeping a second
source of truth that could disagree with the Displays page.
Writes are debounced, serial, and read back. Serial because DDC/CI has
no arbitration and two ddcutil processes on one bus interleave their
exchanges and both return garbage. Read back because a write is not a
promise: panels clamp to their own range, ignore values while waking
from standby, and drop writes that arrive too fast. Without the read the
slider would show what Panama asked for rather than what the monitor
did, which is the same class of lie as trusting `hyprctl keyword`.
Brightness is deliberately not a stored preference. The monitor
remembers it and the bezel buttons change it behind Panama's back, so
persisting it would mean restoring a value the panel had moved past.
The contract runs against fixtures with ddcutil stubbed and both sysfs
roots redirected, so it never touches a real monitor. Its fixture
reports a maximum of 200 rather than 100 on purpose -- at 100 the
scaling arithmetic is the identity and a helper that ignored the
reported maximum would pass everything. Verified it catches that, plus a
dropped connection-status filter and an unstripped connector prefix.
Not yet confirmed against hardware: this machine cannot open any I2C bus
yet. ddcutil's udev rule grants that through uaccess but only to devices
created after it was installed, so it needs one udevadm trigger. The
helper detects exactly that case and returns the command as its error
rather than reporting "no displays".
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Audited bar, dock, quick settings, date menu and Settings for three
things: a setting reachable in one UI but not another, a setting that
exists but is unreachable anywhere, and UI that states something false.
Night Light was fully exposed in Quick Settings and had no control
anywhere in Settings. It now has a card on Displays, where GNOME also
puts it, with on/off, schedule, times and temperature.
Adding those controls would have shipped the exact defect this audit
exists to find. NightLight declared enabled, temperature and automatic
as bindings on the store, but toggle() assigns to them, and an
assignment destroys a QML binding permanently -- so the service wrote to
the store and never read from it again. The Settings controls would have
written values the service ignored, while Quick Settings kept working.
It now follows the store. Every other service was swept for the same
pattern; this was the only one.
The night light schedule was two hardcoded literals, so the hours could
not be changed. They are schema keys now, with a row that renders 17.5
as "5:30 PM" and honours the 24-hour preference rather than showing a
decimal nobody reads as a time.
keyboardLayout was in the schema and read by input.lua but had no
control anywhere: configurable in principle, unreachable in practice. It
is surfaced on Input & Shortcuts as read-only, with the reason, because
it needs a compositor reload and a control implying instant apply would
be a smaller lie but still a lie.
Caffeine was a Quick Settings toggle mentioned only in a subtitle in
Settings. It has a real control now.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Resolution, refresh rate, scale, and rotation, applied through
hl.monitor{} and stored per output.
This is the only setting in Panama where a wrong value can leave the
user unable to SEE the screen well enough to undo it: a mode the panel
cannot show, or a scale that makes everything unreadable, is not
recoverable through the UI that caused it. So a change is never applied
irreversibly. It is applied, then reverted automatically after fifteen
seconds unless confirmed, and confirming is what writes it to the
settings store -- letting the countdown run leaves nothing behind.
The contract tests that property specifically: it applies a scale, waits
out the countdown, and asserts the display came back and that nothing
was stored. A regression there is not a broken feature, it is a user
staring at a blank monitor.
Modes are grouped by resolution with refresh rates beside them. The
panel reports 35, many differing only in refresh-rate rounding -- 60.00
and 59.94 -- which as a flat list of buttons is noise rather than
choice; equal rounded pairs collapse, leaving 21.
Only mode, scale, and transform are configurable. Colour management and
bit depth stay in monitors.lua because they carry a documented screencopy
tradeoff that a settings page cannot explain at the moment you would be
changing it.
Also replaces the display policy rows with the schema-bound ones, so the
page no longer restates labels that PreferenceSchema already holds.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown