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
Home is now Overview | My Home | Phone. Overview leads with quick-action
tiles (focus, Do Not Disturb, health, snapshots, storage), keeps the
findings card — updates fold in, the reclaim-space prompt is gone on
purpose — and adds glance cards, the next calendar event, and weather.
My Home groups every light by Home Assistant area: the helper gained an
`areas` command (one REST template render, no websocket), and the rooms
degrade to a flat list on setups without areas. The favorites editor and
connection card moved intact. Phone gains a vitals strip — battery and
cell signal read from KDE Connect's plugin D-Bus objects, where absence
is data, not an error — beside ring, clipboard, send-a-file, and the
BlueBubbles handoff.
The retired home-phone id resolves to my-home forever via a new alias
map in SettingsRoutes (with a hasOwnProperty guard so prototype names
cannot leak into settingsPage). Storage no longer claims 0 B free — the
old page read a field the disks helper never emitted.
Contracts updated alongside; per the new workflow, the full suite runs
once at the end of the redesign (see the test backlog note).
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
The sidebar was a flat scan of thirty-one rows; now it reads like a
settings app. Multi-subject categories (Input, Network & Sharing,
Applications, Users & Accounts, Privacy & Security, System) carry an
Appearance-style tab strip above the page, drawn by the shell so the
leaf pages themselves are untouched. The taxonomy lives in one new
file, services/SettingsRoutes.qml; the sidebar, the strip, route
validation, search breadcrumbs, and both generators derive from it.
ShellState.settingsPage still holds leaf ids, so every deep link, IPC
call, and search result keeps working — and now lands on the exact
tab. Dictation moves out of Sound onto its own page under Input, with
a handoff back to Sound for the microphone. The strip scrolls when
System's nine tabs outgrow a tiled window. All 161 contracts pass.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
Screenshots and recordings offered three folders to choose between, and three
guesses cannot include the folder somebody's other software already writes to --
which is the only folder that matters. This machine has had ~/Pictures/Screenshots
and ~/Videos/Screencasts since long before Panama, and Panama was writing
recordings to a Videos/Recordings it invented. Both are free text now, and the
recording default is the folder that was already there.
Wallpapers were swept from four directories at once, so the distribution's stock
images arrived mixed in with the user's own and there was no way to ask for just
one. Where wallpapers live is something somebody knows about their own machine.
It is a setting, not a search.
All three accept an absolute path as well as one relative to home, which meant
fixing Capture: it prefixed $HOME unconditionally, so naming /mnt/captures would
have written screenshots to ~/mnt/captures and left nobody able to find them.
The generator turned out to skip any entry whose comment sits inside the braces
rather than above them -- it looks for `key:` immediately after `{`. Three
settings were invisible in the reference because of it, one of them dockScreens,
which has never appeared there at all. The staleness contract could not see it
either: regenerating reproduced the same omission, so the copy was current and
incomplete at once. It now counts what was declared against what it could read
and refuses rather than quietly documenting less than exists.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
Phase 6, the last of the fresh-install spec.
159 scripts lose their .sh: 110 contracts, 47 Vicinae commands, 2 compositor
contracts. A shebang and the executable bit already select the interpreter. The
extension only ever added something that had to stay in sync, and the rename
proved the point twice over in the space of an hour.
The spec's stated risk was Vicinae's script discovery. One script was renamed and
reloaded on its own before the other 46 followed; it came back as
scripts:panama.capture and all 47 resolve. What the probe turned up instead is
that the extension was never only a filename: Vicinae's command IDs embed it, so
every ID changed. Nothing in this repository refers to them, so nothing breaks.
The only trace is Vicinae's metadata.json, whose visited map had two Panama
entries that are now orphaned -- two commands lost their usage ranking and will
earn it back. Worth knowing before anyone renames these again on a machine that
has a keybind pointing at one.
Rewriting the references by exact filename missed two things it structurally
could not see: a name built from a variable, settings-$page.sh, and a glob,
-name '*.sh'. Both were in the contract that counts the generated commands, which
promptly reported 47 expected and 0 found. The mechanical part of a rename is the
part that looks finished.
The three subcommands. panama doctor fronts a health check that already existed
and already ran at the end of every install but could not be reached from a
terminal. panama upgrade re-runs the installer from anywhere. panama test runs
the suite, which had no entry point at all -- 121 files that were the main safety
net in this repository and were invisible in it.
Writing that runner found three tests nothing was running.
calendar_agenda_bridge_test, home_assistant_bridge_test and kdeconnect_bridge_test
are unittest suites without the executable bit, so no contract invoked them and
the first draft of the runner skipped them silently. All three pass, and have
passed unobserved for weeks. The runner collects *_test.py as well now, because a
runner with a blind spot is worse than no runner for the same reason a dependency
checker with one is: it reports PASS.
Six worktrees pruned. Each was re-checked rather than trusted to the spec's list,
and two needed it: panama-commands is not on feat/panama-commands but on
feat/gnome-tweaks-parity, and fix/panama-displays-review reads [ahead 3] -- ahead
of its remote, not of main, with every commit patch-equivalent to landed work.
roadmap-completion stays; it has five commits that are genuinely unlanded. The
branches are left alone: pruning a worktree costs nothing, deleting a branch is a
decision.
121 contracts pass.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NvgBuSWB5sE43yWmg21ozj
Gabriel Brown