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
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
Light is Tokyo Night Day, the palette's own light variant, rather than
one invented to merely not be dark. Both share the same hues at
different lightness, which is what lets the Prism signature survive the
switch: blue still leads into orchid, it is simply a darker blue on a
lighter ground.
Every colour token became a binding on one boolean, so flipping it
repaints the whole shell without any component needing to know it
happened. That only worked because nothing outside Theme.qml defines a
colour; the two places that did are fixed here.
Surface alphas differ by scheme. The 0.34 that reads as glass over a
dark desktop reads as haze over a light one, and text stops being
legible on it.
Two things that draw on this desktop do not read Panama's store: GTK
applications, which read gsettings, and the compositor, which draws
window borders. A toolbar or a border still wearing the other scheme is
more jarring than either scheme on its own, so ColorScheme pushes the
choice to both. It also pushes at startup, since a scheme chosen in a
previous session would otherwise be in effect only for the shell.
The unfocused window border follows too. It is a flat neutral, and a
dark neutral is invisible against a light desktop. The focused border is
the prism gradient and needs no variant.
The live preview follows the scheme as well. A preview that stayed dark
while the shell around it went light did not read as "your desktop", it
read as a screenshot of someone else's.
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
Gabriel Brown