Desktop & Dock becomes Shell — Bar, Dock, Control Center, Tiling,
Workspaces — the home for everything Quickshell draws. The settings-
management cluster moves to System as Sync & Backup, Appearance's
Shell tab dissolves, and 24-hour time finally lives on Date & Time,
which always owned it.
The bar gets what it never had: a way to survive the wallpaper. A
second neutral text family (follow theme, or forced light or dark),
a one-layer shadow under every glyph, and a gradient scrim for
wallpapers nothing else survives — all off by default, pixel-identical
until asked. Widgets earn toggles (weather, media, clipboard, calendar
countdown), the vitals cluster stops leaving a dead pill behind, and
Control Center's sections learn to step aside.
The dock graduates from MVP: a context menu with window rows, pin,
unpin, quit and new-window; scroll an icon to cycle its windows; drag
to reorder on the dock itself; hover previews with one-shot captures;
and "Add App to Dock" in the launcher. Three real bugs died en route —
menus that slid away with the autohide, a readonly-property crash on
every menu open, and a drag that drifted half a slot per icon on side
docks. The pinned-apps editor in Settings becomes a drag strip.
166 contracts; the full suite is green except two live display and
switcher tests that cannot run behind a locked session — re-verified
on unlock.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
The Dock's pinned applications were a sixteen-entry literal in
Settings.qml, so changing what sits in the Dock meant editing QML. They
are now an ordered list in the shared store, with move up, move down,
unpin, and a filtered picker for adding installed applications. Keeping
them in the shared store rather than a file of their own means they are
covered by Restore defaults like everything else.
This needed a "json" schema type for values the schema stores and resets
but does not validate field by field. It exists so structured settings
can live in the one file rather than growing a fourth preference store;
the owning service validates the contents.
Snapshots make the settings app safe to experiment with. The whole
configuration is one file, so a backup is a copy and a restore is an
overwrite, and restoring snapshots what it replaces so it is itself
undoable. A snapshot is validated as JSON before it can be restored over
a working configuration, and a name that is not a plain snapshot
filename from the backup directory is refused.
Snapshot names carry milliseconds. At one-second resolution a save
followed promptly by a restore produced the same filename twice, and the
restore's own safety snapshot overwrote the file it was about to read --
found by the contract, which restores immediately after saving.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown