Gabriel Brown
7541a45e77
brightnessctl drives the kernel backlight class, which laptop panels have and this desktop does not -- it reports only keyboard and NIC LEDs. So BrightnessControl removed itself and there was no way to dim the screen from Panama at all. DDC/CI is the channel the buttons on a monitor's bezel drive, and it is the only brightness an external display has. Both sources now render a row each, so a machine gets whichever it actually has, or none. Displays are enumerated from sysfs rather than `ddcutil detect`. The kernel publishes the connector-to-bus mapping as /sys/class/drm/<card>-<connector>/ddc along with whether anything is plugged in, which beats parsing detect's undocumented brief output, yields the connector name spelled exactly as Hyprland spells it, and probes only connectors with a monitor attached -- one bus on this machine rather than fourteen, where each empty bus costs a timeout. No model name is read: Hyprland already knows what every output is called, so the UI joins on the connector instead of keeping a second source of truth that could disagree with the Displays page. Writes are debounced, serial, and read back. Serial because DDC/CI has no arbitration and two ddcutil processes on one bus interleave their exchanges and both return garbage. Read back because a write is not a promise: panels clamp to their own range, ignore values while waking from standby, and drop writes that arrive too fast. Without the read the slider would show what Panama asked for rather than what the monitor did, which is the same class of lie as trusting `hyprctl keyword`. Brightness is deliberately not a stored preference. The monitor remembers it and the bezel buttons change it behind Panama's back, so persisting it would mean restoring a value the panel had moved past. The contract runs against fixtures with ddcutil stubbed and both sysfs roots redirected, so it never touches a real monitor. Its fixture reports a maximum of 200 rather than 100 on purpose -- at 100 the scaling arithmetic is the identity and a helper that ignored the reported maximum would pass everything. Verified it catches that, plus a dropped connection-status filter and an unstripped connector prefix. Not yet confirmed against hardware: this machine cannot open any I2C bus yet. ddcutil's udev rule grants that through uaccess but only to devices created after it was installed, so it needs one udevadm trigger. The helper detects exactly that case and returns the command as its error rather than reporting "no displays". Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Panama Settings
The control centre for everything Panama owns. Anything the system owns — hardware, accounts, printers — is delegated to GNOME Settings and labelled as such rather than half-reimplemented.
Adding a setting
One schema entry. That is the whole job.
// config/PreferenceSchema.qml
{
key: "blurSize", type: "int", def: 8, min: 1, max: 20, step: 1,
unit: "px", group: "effects",
label: "Blur radius",
detail: "Larger is softer and costs more frame time",
hypr: { path: ["decoration", "blur", "size"], option: "decoration:blur:size", readAs: "int" }
}
// the page
SliderRow { setting: "blurSize" }
Persistence, validation, clamping, reset, search indexing, and — with a hypr
block — live application to the compositor and the startup replay all derive
from that entry. There is nothing else to register.
If it is compositor-backed, add the matching prefs.get("blurSize", 8) in
hypr/looks.lua so the Hyprland config still stands alone with no settings
file.
The rows
| Component | For |
|---|---|
SettingsPage |
The page scaffold: title, lede, optional pinned header |
ToggleRow { setting } |
A boolean |
SliderRow { setting } |
A number; zeroLabel renders 0 as "Never"/"Instant"/"None" |
ChoiceRow { setting } |
An enum, as a segmented control |
ActionRow |
A button: opens a GNOME panel, runs a one-shot |
TextRow |
A genuinely read-only fact |
TextRow is for facts, not for settings that were merely expensive to wire.
Before Stage 3 more than half of all rows were static text standing in for
controls; that is the failure this vocabulary exists to prevent.
Rows write through SystemSettings.commitPreference(key, value), which routes
compositor-backed keys through apply-and-verify and local keys straight to the
store. A row never needs to know which kind it holds.
Things that will bite you
readAs describes the answer, not the setting. hyprctl getoption returns
the value in a different JSON field per type — int, bool, float, str,
and css for gaps (a four-value box). Declaring the wrong one does not fail
loudly: it makes every write to that key look rejected, and the user sees an
error for a change that worked. tests/quickshell/schema-hypr-shape-contract.sh
asks the compositor for the real shape of every mapped option.
Never trust an exit code from hyprctl. keyword refuses to work on a
Lua-configured Hyprland, prints the refusal to stdout, and exits 0. eval exits
0 on syntax and runtime errors too. The only trustworthy signal that a write
landed is reading the value back.
The Settings window is tiled. implicitWidth is a hint; the layout decides,
and it ranges from a half-screen split to the full display. SliderRow stacks
its control under the label below 520px. Test narrow.
Binding an anchor to undefined does not reliably release it. Switching
layouts that way left a slider anchored to both edges with the label squeezed
into what was left. Position explicitly instead.
Inside a SettingsCard, parent is the card's internal Column. So
parent.modelData in a nested Repeater is undefined and the rows silently
never appear — you get a card with a heading and nothing under it. Address the
outer model through an explicit id.
A TapHandler declared as a child of SettingRow lands in the trailing
slot, because that is the row's default property, so only the right-hand edge
becomes clickable. Use activatable: true with onActivated for a whole-row
target.
A copy of the Quickshell config shares the live shell's ID. Quickshell
derives the Shell ID from config content, not path, so
cp -a config/dot/quickshell $tmp && qs -p $tmp kill kills the running
desktop, and qs -p $tmp ipc call … can drive it. Harnesses that point at a
single distinct .qml file are safe; copying the whole directory is not.
Where state lives
| File | Holds |
|---|---|
~/.config/panama/settings.json |
Everything in the schema. Read by the shell and by hypr/prefs.lua |
$XDG_STATE_HOME/panama/panama-home.json |
Home accessory favourites and aliases |
$XDG_STATE_HOME/panama/backups/ |
Settings snapshots |
$XDG_STATE_HOME/panama/hypridle.conf |
Generated idle config |
SystemSettings.restoreDefaults() spans all of them. A reset that silently
skipped one would be worse than having no reset, because nothing would say so.
Not stored by Panama
Timezone and network time are read from and written to timedatectl directly.
They belong to the machine and are shared with sessions that never see Panama's
file; storing a copy would create a second answer to a question the system
already answers.