Gabriel Brown
9c574f9eb7
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
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.