Gabriel Brown
f8f5b25510
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
162 lines
7.5 KiB
Markdown
162 lines
7.5 KiB
Markdown
# Making it yours
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## Settings
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`Super + I`. Fourteen categories down the side, covering appearance, displays,
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sound, input, network, power, accounts and the rest. A category with more than
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one subject in it opens a row of tabs above the page, which is where the
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narrower topics live: Printers is a tab of Network & Sharing, Dictation a tab
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of Input, and About, Software Update, Storage, Snapshots, Sync & Backup and
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this manual are tabs of System.
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Home is the first of them, and the page `Super + I` lands on. Its Overview tab
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is the one you already know; My Home lists your Home Assistant lights by room
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alongside the accessories Control Center shows, and Phone holds the iPhone
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handoffs — battery, ring it, send it the clipboard or a file, and Messages.
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The search box at the top searches the settings themselves rather than page
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names, and each result says where it will land, so if you know what you want
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to change you can type it and never touch the sidebar.
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## Appearance
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The Appearance page opens on **Themes**. At the top are light and dark, side by
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side, each showing the theme it will land on; below them are two galleries —
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six dark themes and four light ones, including Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox and
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Everforest alongside Panama's own Tokyo Night Moon and Day.
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Light and dark remember separately. Pick Everforest for the dark side and
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Catppuccin Latte for the light one, and flipping between them lands on each
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rather than resetting to the shipped pair.
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Choosing a theme repaints the shell, the terminal, GTK applications, the lock
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screen and the system monitor at once — not just the shell's own windows.
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### Build your own
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The **Theme editor** tab is four colours: primary, secondary, background and
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foreground. Each has a swatch, a hex field you can type into, a colour wheel
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and an eyedropper for sampling anything on screen. Background and foreground
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are not single colours — the panels, popovers, dividers and dimmed text are all
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mixed from them, so moving the background moves the whole family with it.
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Under that, a saturation slider for the whole palette at once, a fine-tune for
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the exact hue of each end of the accent, and the effects — corners, blur,
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shadows, glow and motion. Save it with a name and it appears in the galleries
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above beside the shipped ones, effects included. Editing a shipped theme does
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not damage it: it makes you a copy.
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### Wallpapers
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The wallpaper is per-monitor if you want it to be, and it can be a video.
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Videos loop muted and decode on the GPU. They pause themselves while a game is
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running, and on battery unless you say otherwise; while one is playing a pill
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appears in the bar, and clicking it pauses immediately — for a call, a
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recording, or just quiet. The lock screen shows a still frame from the video,
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because it cannot play motion.
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### Titlebars
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There is no minimize button, on Panama's windows or on GNOME applications.
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Hyprland has no minimize, so the button would do nothing; maximize means very
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little in a tiler. You get close, on whichever side you prefer. Panama's own
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titlebar can be turned off entirely, which leaves the Settings window bare:
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`Super + Q` closes it, `Super + drag` moves it, `Escape` still works.
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## Shell
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Everything Panama draws on the screen has a tab under **Shell**: the bar, the
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dock, Control Center, tiling and workspaces. Appearance decides the colours;
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this decides what is there at all.
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### The bar
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The bar has no background of its own — it floats on your wallpaper. That is
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fine over most images and hopeless over a few, so the **Bar** tab opens on the
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three controls that fix it. **Bar text** follows your theme by default, or you
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can force it light or dark for the wallpaper you actually use. **Bar text
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shadow** puts a soft halo under every glyph at once. **Bar backdrop** fades a
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thin scrim down from the top edge. All three land on the real bar above the
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window as you change them, so you can watch rather than guess.
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Under that, one switch per widget: weather, media, the clipboard button, the
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calendar countdown, processor, memory, graphics, battery and agent usage. A
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switch only ever removes something — turning weather on does not make a
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forecast appear before one has been fetched. The indicators that come and go on
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their own — system health, microphone and camera, focus, a paused video
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wallpaper — have no switches, because they are already absent whenever they
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have nothing to say.
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Seconds and the weekday are here too. **24-hour time** is not: it also changes
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the date menu, your notification timestamps and the lock screen, so it lives on
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System › Date & Time with the rest of the clock.
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### The dock
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**Pinned applications** shows the dock as the dock shows it. Drag an icon to
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move it, hover one for the × that unpins it, and search underneath to add
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something. The order here is the order on screen.
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The dock itself takes the same gestures now. Drag an icon along the dock to
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reorder it without opening Settings at all. Right-click one for its menu: every
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open window of that application listed by title, whatever shortcuts the
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application itself offers, then a new window, pin or unpin, quit, and **Dock
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settings** if you want the rest. Scroll on an icon to step through that
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application's windows. Hover one that has windows open and a preview of each
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appears after a moment.
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For pinning something that is not running, the launcher has **Add App to
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Dock** — type it into `Super + Space`, pick the application, done.
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### Control Center
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The panel that opens from the status cluster at the right of the bar. The
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**Control Center** tab turns its sections on and off: Focus, Home and Phone.
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Hiding one only hides it from the panel; the settings page behind it still
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works.
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### Tiling and workspaces
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The last two tabs hold what used to be spread across the old Desktop page.
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**Tiling** is the window layout, the master area, gaps and window edges, and
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the Hyprland notices Panama keeps quiet. **Workspaces** is the workspace
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behaviour, how long a focus session runs, and your saved projects.
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## Carrying settings between machines
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System › **Sync & Backup**. Export writes your settings to a file; importing
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one shows you exactly what would change before anything does, and you decide
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then. Below it, **Settings backups** keeps dated copies you can restore from —
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these are your settings, not btrfs Snapshots, which is a different tab and
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covers the whole filesystem. **Restore defaults** is at the bottom: it resets
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appearance, dock, clock, focus and display policy and clears your Home
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accessory arrangement, and leaves your pinned applications, files and paired
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devices alone.
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## Applications
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`panama apps` in a terminal offers the optional application categories the
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installer asked about, so a machine can acquire Slack in March without having
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wanted Discord in January.
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`panama app` builds the handful of applications no repository carries. It is
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deliberately not part of installing, because a source build is slow and
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depends on an upstream that moves.
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## Autostart and defaults
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The Applications settings page controls which application opens which kind of
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file, and what starts when you log in.
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## Going further
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The compositor is configured in Lua under `~/.config/hypr`, and every file
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there explains what it does and why. `overrides.lua` is loaded last and is
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the intended place for per-machine changes, so you can adjust anything
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without editing a file the repository will update.
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The shell is QML under `~/.config/quickshell`. Both directories are symlinks
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into the Panama repository, so an edit is a change to your checkout and
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`panama update` will offer to commit it.
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