Continues the settings expansion toward replacing GNOME Settings for
everything Panama actually owns.
Wallpaper. A thumbnail grid rather than a path field: the value of this
setting is the picture, so typing a path to something you cannot see is
the worst version of it. Two things about hyprpaper 0.8 shaped this. Its
IPC is much smaller than older documentation suggests -- preload,
listloaded, unload, and reload all answer "invalid hyprpaper request",
so setting is a single call with no preload. And the "<empty>,<path>"
form that used to mean every output is silently ignored, so a wallpaper
set that way appears to succeed and never changes; outputs are walked
explicitly instead. hyprpaper.conf lives in the repo through the
~/.config/hypr symlink and so cannot hold machine state, which is why
the choice lives in the shared settings store and is re-applied at
startup.
Power & Lock. hypridle has no IPC for reconfiguration and its config is
hyprlang rather than the shared JSON, so scripts/panama-idle generates a
config from the settings store and restarts the daemon. The generated
file lives under XDG_STATE_HOME for the same symlink reason, with a
systemd drop-in pointing hypridle at it. Management is a real state and
the page says which one you are in rather than showing sliders that
quietly do nothing. Zero means never for all three timers, which a naive
template would render as "immediately".
Date & Time. Deliberately not stored in Panama's settings: the timezone
and network time belong to the machine and are shared with sessions that
never see this file. Storing a copy would create a second answer to a
question the system already answers. Reads and writes timedatectl
directly; a cancelled polkit prompt surfaces as an error rather than as
a value that appears to have been accepted.
Accessibility. Pointer size and text scale have to agree across three
consumers with no shared configuration -- the compositor, GTK, and the
shell -- so the store is the source of truth and the values are pushed
outward to gsettings and hyprctl setcursor.
Search now indexes the schema instead of the twelve page labels. "gaps",
"wallpaper", and "screenshot" previously found nothing on an app that
has all three, which is the clearest way a settings app feels smaller
than it is. Shortcuts are indexed by what they do. A contract asserts
every non-internal schema label is reachable, so a new setting cannot be
added in an undiscoverable state.
The GNOME delegation allow-list was widened to the panel names
gnome-control-center actually reports; the previous list contained
"users", which is not one of them and so opened nothing.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Stage 3 and 4 of docs/superpowers/plans/2026-08-17-panama-cohesion.md.
Add SettingsPage plus ToggleRow, SliderRow, ChoiceRow, ActionRow, and
TextRow. A row names a schema key and needs nothing else: label, detail,
range, and unit come from PreferenceSchema, and writes go through
SystemSettings.commitPreference, which routes compositor-backed keys
through apply-and-verify and local keys straight to the store. The page
scaffold that was copy-pasted eleven times is now one component.
Rebuild Appearance around a live preview of the real desktop, scaled by
the ratio between the preview and the actual monitor so a 10px gap on a
4500px display looks as small as it is. Rebuild Desktop & Dock and Input
& Shortcuts on the shared rows, replacing the read-only text that stood
in for controls that were merely expensive to add.
Generate the shortcut list from hyprctl binds. The page held a
hand-typed nineteen entries against a real keymap of a hundred and
thirteen; it could not show the rest and went stale whenever a bind
changed. Every bind now carries its own description -- backfilled for
the twenty-nine that lacked one -- and keybinds-contract.sh fails if any
bind lacks one, since undescribed binds are dropped from the page.
Make Restore defaults span every store Panama owns. Resetting only the
schema store left the Home accessory arrangement customised while
claiming to restore defaults, which is worse than no reset because it is
silent. Done through HomePreferences' existing public aliases rather
than a new API.
Four defects found while building:
cursor:inactive_timeout is answered by getoption as float, not int. A
wrong readAs does not fail loudly; it makes every write to that key look
rejected, and the user saw an error for a change that worked.
schema-hypr-shape-contract.sh now checks all 23 mapped options against
the running compositor.
The Settings window is tiled, so implicitWidth is only a hint and rows
must survive roughly 400px. SliderRow stacks its control under the label
below 520px.
Binding an anchor to undefined to switch layouts does not reliably
release it. Both row layouts are positioned explicitly.
Concurrent compositor writes are queued and merged rather than refused.
The startup replay of every compositor-backed preference routinely
overlaps a UI change, and refusing left the store and the compositor
disagreeing.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Panama had grown into three configuration surfaces that only agreed because
they had been typed to agree: looks.lua hardcoded values, DesktopPreferences
independently defaulted the same values, and SystemSettings replayed them at
startup. Nothing kept them in sync, and the Lua side read no shared state at
all. This lands the first three stages of docs/superpowers/plans/2026-08-17-panama-cohesion.md.
Fix silently failing Hyprland writes. On a Lua-configured Hyprland, hyprctl
keyword refuses the write, prints the refusal to stdout, and still exits 0, so
the HDR, VRR, and direct-scanout toggles persisted their value and reported
success while the compositor never changed. Writes now go through hyprctl eval,
which has the same hazard on syntax and runtime errors, so success is defined
as reading the value back and finding it equal. The existing contract passed
throughout the outage because it re-applied the values already in place; the
new one flips each value to something it does not hold.
Derive preferences from a schema. Every setting used to be restated four times
-- a property alias, a JSON adapter property, a change handler, and a line in
reset -- where omitting any one failed silently. PreferenceSchema.qml is now
the single source, and persistence, validation, reset, and the Hyprland mapping
all derive from it. Unknown keys on disk survive a write so a rollback does not
discard a newer build's settings, and a corrupt file falls back to shipped
defaults. The store moved to ~/.config/panama/settings.json, migrating from the
old state directory without deleting it.
Share that file with Hyprland. prefs.lua reads it at config time with every
shipped literal kept as the fallback, so the config still stands alone. The Lua
is the default, the JSON is the truth, and Settings is the editor. The
compositor-adjustable surface goes from 3 keys to 23.
Also fixes two test-hygiene bugs found by running the suite end to end for the
first time: settings-pages-contract could see the window settings-window-contract
leaves behind, and the new write contract was persisting its deliberately-wrong
values into the user's real store.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown