Gabriel Brown
cb7c09d208
Appearance now opens on Themes: light and dark side by side, each remembering its own choice, over galleries of ten shipped themes — Tokyo Moon and Day joined by Moon Rose, Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox and Everforest in both modes. A theme is a complete palette: the catalog lives in themes.json, Theme.qml reads every color token from the active record, and one render pipeline carries it to kitty, tmux, btop, GTK, Vicinae, Firefox's chrome, and the lock screen. The Theme editor builds new ones from four wells — wheel, hex, or eyedropper — with derived surfaces, a saturation slider, debounced fine-tune, and effects that save with the theme. Custom edits finally keep GNOME's accent, kitty's border, and hyprlock in sync. Wallpapers can be video: mpvpaper per output, hardware-decoded, muted and looped, supervised and respawned. Panama owns the pausing — games, battery, and a bar pill for right now — because the compositor rebuilds full-screen blur for every frame a video wallpaper draws. The lock screen gets a still frame. Titlebars stop lying. GNOME apps get close-only on your chosen side, the maximize and double-click settings are gone, the Settings window obeys the same rules, and its titlebar can be turned off entirely. Typography becomes five labeled dropdowns instead of a wall of samples. Contracts updated and written throughout (165 now); per the redesign workflow none were executed — the full sweep runs once at the end. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
4.1 KiB
Making it yours
Settings
Super + I. Fourteen categories down the side, covering appearance, displays,
sound, input, network, power, accounts and the rest. A category with more than
one subject in it opens a row of tabs above the page, which is where the
narrower topics live: Printers is a tab of Network & Sharing, Dictation a tab
of Input, and About, Software Update, Storage, Snapshots and this manual are
tabs of System.
Home is the first of them, and the page Super + I lands on. Its Overview tab
is the one you already know; My Home lists your Home Assistant lights by room
alongside the accessories Control Center shows, and Phone holds the iPhone
handoffs — battery, ring it, send it the clipboard or a file, and Messages.
The search box at the top searches the settings themselves rather than page names, and each result says where it will land, so if you know what you want to change you can type it and never touch the sidebar.
Appearance
The Appearance page opens on Themes. At the top are light and dark, side by side, each showing the theme it will land on; below them are two galleries — six dark themes and four light ones, including Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox and Everforest alongside Panama's own Tokyo Night Moon and Day.
Light and dark remember separately. Pick Everforest for the dark side and Catppuccin Latte for the light one, and flipping between them lands on each rather than resetting to the shipped pair.
Choosing a theme repaints the shell, the terminal, GTK applications, the lock screen and the system monitor at once — not just the shell's own windows.
Build your own
The Theme editor tab is four colours: primary, secondary, background and foreground. Each has a swatch, a hex field you can type into, a colour wheel and an eyedropper for sampling anything on screen. Background and foreground are not single colours — the panels, popovers, dividers and dimmed text are all mixed from them, so moving the background moves the whole family with it.
Under that, a saturation slider for the whole palette at once, a fine-tune for the exact hue of each end of the accent, and the effects — corners, blur, shadows, glow and motion. Save it with a name and it appears in the galleries above beside the shipped ones, effects included. Editing a shipped theme does not damage it: it makes you a copy.
Wallpapers
The wallpaper is per-monitor if you want it to be, and it can be a video.
Videos loop muted and decode on the GPU. They pause themselves while a game is running, and on battery unless you say otherwise; while one is playing a pill appears in the bar, and clicking it pauses immediately — for a call, a recording, or just quiet. The lock screen shows a still frame from the video, because it cannot play motion.
Titlebars
There is no minimize button, on Panama's windows or on GNOME applications.
Hyprland has no minimize, so the button would do nothing; maximize means very
little in a tiler. You get close, on whichever side you prefer. Panama's own
titlebar can be turned off entirely, which leaves the Settings window bare:
Super + Q closes it, Super + drag moves it, Escape still works.
Applications
panama apps in a terminal offers the optional application categories the
installer asked about, so a machine can acquire Slack in March without having
wanted Discord in January.
panama app builds the handful of applications no repository carries. It is
deliberately not part of installing, because a source build is slow and
depends on an upstream that moves.
Autostart and defaults
The Applications settings page controls which application opens which kind of file, and what starts when you log in.
Going further
The compositor is configured in Lua under ~/.config/hypr, and every file
there explains what it does and why. overrides.lua is loaded last and is
the intended place for per-machine changes, so you can adjust anything
without editing a file the repository will update.
The shell is QML under ~/.config/quickshell. Both directories are symlinks
into the Panama repository, so an edit is a change to your checkout and
panama update will offer to commit it.