Measured the gap first: of the 38 real Hyprland options Panama's own Lua
sets, only 16 were editable in Settings. Everything else required a text
editor, which is the thing this app exists to stop. This closes most of
that: 66 mapped options now, from 47.
Window shape and shadows on Appearance: corner shape (rounding_power),
focused and fullscreen opacity, shadow falloff and hard-edged shadows.
Window edges, master layout and Hyprland's own notices on Desktop & Dock.
Three of these are corrections rather than additions.
Master layout options existed nowhere, while Settings has offered "Master
and stack" as a choice since this morning -- a layout you can select and
cannot configure is barely a choice. Its card is hidden unless that
layout is actually selected, since settings that do nothing under the
layout you are running are worse than not offering the layout at all.
The four Hyprland notices -- logo, splash, update news, donation nag --
are all turned off by looks.lua on the user's behalf. Defensible as a
default, but not a decision anyone could reverse. They are stored
positively ("show this") and written as Hyprland's `disable_*` through a
new `invert` flag, because a switch labelled "Disable splash text" that
must be ON to hide something is a small cruelty. The Lua does the same
inversion so both sides agree.
Everything new also reads from prefs in looks.lua. Without that these
would apply live and silently revert on the next compositor reload,
which is the failure this codebase keeps designing against.
Two shapes the write path had never seen. Border colours are gradients
and shadow offsets are vec2, and the verifier understood neither -- it
returned false for anything outside int/bool/float/str/css, so both
would have reported every write as rejected. Gradients also need real
care: the stubs declare them as `string|{colors,angle}`, and the string
form carries only ONE stop, so writing "rgba(a) rgba(b) 45deg" as a
string is accepted and keeps the previous value. Verified that directly.
They are also written in one notation and read back in another
(`{colors={"rgba(3b426199)"},angle=45}` becomes `993b4261 45deg`), so
comparison normalises both sides.
Border COLOUR is deliberately not exposed yet. col.inactive_border is
written by ColorScheme on every scheme change, so a user's choice would
be silently overwritten, and col.active_border is the Prism gradient,
which needs a colour control this app does not have. Shadow offset is
left out for the same reason -- the vec2 support is in place for
whenever the widget exists.
Verified each new option applies and reverts against the live
compositor, and that the schema, enum-map, nav, write and commit/reset
contracts all pass.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Found by codex's GNOME Tweaks audit and verified against the compositor:
`hyprctl descriptions` publishes input:follow_mouse as
map: [{"separate":3},{"detached":2},{"follow":1},{"disabled":0}].
Panama labelled 0 "Never", 1 "Click to focus", 2 "Sloppy focus". So this
desktop, sitting on the shipped value of 1, has been running
focus-follows-pointer the whole time while Settings called it "Click to
focus" -- and the way to actually GET click-to-focus was to choose
"Never". Value 3 was not offered at all. hypr/input.lua carried the same
wrong claim in a comment.
The shipped VALUE is left alone. Which focus mode this desktop should
use is a behaviour decision rather than a correction, and all four are
now reachable from Settings.
Nothing could have caught this. The compositor accepts 1, reads back 1,
and the write contract passes: the value is valid, it just means
something other than the label. The only authority on what each number
MEANS is the compositor, and it publishes that. So enum-hypr-map-contract
now checks every compositor-backed enum against the published map --
that offered values exist, and that published values are offered, since
a missing one is a capability nobody can reach.
Writing it immediately found two more of the same: variable refresh rate
offered Off and fullscreen-games while the compositor publishes four
(always-on and fullscreen-only were unreachable, and fullscreen-only is
what someone wanting VRR for video rather than games wants), and direct
scanout was missing its always-on value. Both now offer everything, with
a detail line per option rather than a bare word.
Verified the contract catches the original followMouse gap and a value
outside the map.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
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
Theme.qml was the largest remaining thing in this desktop that could
only be changed by editing a file, and typeface is the first thing
someone changes when they want a desktop to feel like theirs. Interface
font, icon font, and the base text size are settings now.
The two font choices are deliberately separate lists. Theme.fontMono is
used only to draw glyphs -- workspace pills, the status cluster, search
icons -- so a plain monospace family there replaces every icon in the
shell with tofu. The picker offers only Nerd Fonts for that slot and
says why.
Candidates are rendered in the family they name. A list of font names
set in the current font tells you nothing about what you are choosing.
The four type sizes derive from the base rather than being stored
separately, so the relationship between body, caption, heading and title
survives a change instead of four numbers drifting apart.
hypr/looks.lua reads the same key. Following the preference only on the
QML side would leave the compositor and the shell disagreeing about the
interface font, which nobody notices until a tooltip renders in a
different typeface.
Only a family this machine reports is accepted: the value reaches
hl.config as a string, and a settings file moved between machines will
name fonts that are not installed. A missing family is reported rather
than silently substituted by fontconfig.
Also collapses the wallpaper grid to two rows. Sixty tiles is two
screens of pictures on a page that also holds typography, window
geometry and effects -- everything below it was unreachable without
scrolling past all of them.
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
Records how to add a setting -- one schema entry -- and the failure
modes found building the pages. Every one of them fails silently rather
than loudly, which is why they are worth writing down: a wrong readAs
makes successful writes look rejected, hyprpaper accepts an all-outputs
wallpaper request and ignores it, and a copy of the Quickshell config
shares the live shell's ID so an "isolated" harness can kill the running
desktop.
Also documents the two generated configurations and why they are
generated: ~/.config/hypr is a symlink into this repository, so writing
there at runtime would commit machine state to a tracked file.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Every bind in keybinds.lua now goes through a small wrapper that
substitutes the chord from a stored override. Only the chord is taken
from settings; the action is always the Lua value written in that file,
so an override can move a shortcut but can never make one do something
else. That is the property that makes reading them from a file the user
can edit safe, and it is why the alternative -- storing dispatchers --
was not considered.
Overrides are keyed by the shipped chord rather than the description.
Keying by description moved every bind that shared one: rebinding
SUPER+C also moved the XF86Calculator hardware key onto the same chord,
silently costing it. Chords are unique; descriptions are not.
Applying needs hyprctl reload rather than a live hl.bind. Hyprland
reports Lua-defined binds with dispatcher "__lua" and a bytecode offset,
so the action cannot be reconstructed from outside to re-bind it; reload
re-runs the config, which re-reads the settings file.
The capture control ignores modifier-only presses, because every chord
passes through them and holding Super would otherwise be captured the
moment the modifier went down. It refuses a bare letter, which would
swallow ordinary typing, and refuses a key with no keysym name rather
than storing something that would fail to bind. Rebinding onto a chord
already in use is refused rather than shadowing the existing shortcut.
The refactor was verified by snapshotting all 113 binds before and
after: the keymap is byte-identical, and identical again after applying
an override and resetting it.
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