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
colour -> color, behaviour -> behavior, centre -> center, favourite ->
favorite, and about twenty other pairs, applied consistently across
comments, docs, error/UI copy, and a handful of QML identifiers that
used the British spelling as their actual name: SystemSettings'
serialiseValue/serialiseTable/normaliseGradient, Displays'
normaliseModes, Wallpaper's normalisePolicy, SettingsBackup's
serialiseHomeState, DateTime's ntpSynchronised property, Clipboard's
_normalise helper, and ShortcutCapture's cancelled signal (with its
onCancelled handler in ShortcutsPage.qml). Every call site and the two
tests that assert on the literal source text (settings-ownership and
settings-backup-live contracts) were updated in lockstep.
Left untouched: config/dot/espanso/match/packages/misspell-en/ is a
vendored third-party autocorrect dictionary -- its entries are typo
corrections, not our prose, and rewriting them would fight the
package's own purpose (and any future re-sync from upstream).
The already-American `favorites` property (Home page pinned
accessories) was never actually misspelled -- only nearby comments and
error strings said "favourites" -- so no data migration was needed
there.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E6TJUAh41HaP25MVHWkhRZ
Reported symptom: Electron applications and a Chromium-based browser,
all set to follow the system, went light when the desktop went light and
never came back. Nothing reported an error, and the portal was serving
the correct value the whole time.
Cause: ColorScheme set gtk-theme to "Adwaita-dark" for dark and
"Adwaita" for light. Neither is installed on Fedora 44 -- only adw-gtk3
and adw-gtk3-dark are. GTK responds to an unknown theme name by falling
back to its built-in default, which is LIGHT. So asking for light worked
by accident, asking for dark silently produced light, and anything that
takes its cue from the GTK theme rather than the portal stayed light no
matter what org.freedesktop.appearance said. Verified: the portal emits
correctly in both directions, so this was never the portal's fault.
Second cause, the mirror of the first: gtk-3.0/settings.ini and
gtk-4.0/settings.ini were pinned to adw-gtk3-dark and prefer-dark=1 and
never regenerated. Under GNOME that file is ignored because
gnome-settings-daemon publishes over XSETTINGS; under Hyprland nothing
does, so for GTK3 it is authoritative -- and it contradicted the scheme
in light mode. They are now generated from a template on every switch,
gitignored as machine state, and seeded by link-dotfiles, the same shape
kitty's current-theme.conf already uses. These directories are symlinked
into the repository, so writing the live file directly would dirty the
working tree on every theme switch.
The failure was silent by construction, so it gets a test rather than a
comment: gtk-theme-contract asserts every theme name Panama sets is
actually installed, and that the generated GTK config agrees with the
scheme in both directions. Verified it catches both original bugs.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown
gib