Measured the gap first: of the 38 real Hyprland options Panama's own Lua
sets, only 16 were editable in Settings. Everything else required a text
editor, which is the thing this app exists to stop. This closes most of
that: 66 mapped options now, from 47.
Window shape and shadows on Appearance: corner shape (rounding_power),
focused and fullscreen opacity, shadow falloff and hard-edged shadows.
Window edges, master layout and Hyprland's own notices on Desktop & Dock.
Three of these are corrections rather than additions.
Master layout options existed nowhere, while Settings has offered "Master
and stack" as a choice since this morning -- a layout you can select and
cannot configure is barely a choice. Its card is hidden unless that
layout is actually selected, since settings that do nothing under the
layout you are running are worse than not offering the layout at all.
The four Hyprland notices -- logo, splash, update news, donation nag --
are all turned off by looks.lua on the user's behalf. Defensible as a
default, but not a decision anyone could reverse. They are stored
positively ("show this") and written as Hyprland's `disable_*` through a
new `invert` flag, because a switch labelled "Disable splash text" that
must be ON to hide something is a small cruelty. The Lua does the same
inversion so both sides agree.
Everything new also reads from prefs in looks.lua. Without that these
would apply live and silently revert on the next compositor reload,
which is the failure this codebase keeps designing against.
Two shapes the write path had never seen. Border colours are gradients
and shadow offsets are vec2, and the verifier understood neither -- it
returned false for anything outside int/bool/float/str/css, so both
would have reported every write as rejected. Gradients also need real
care: the stubs declare them as `string|{colors,angle}`, and the string
form carries only ONE stop, so writing "rgba(a) rgba(b) 45deg" as a
string is accepted and keeps the previous value. Verified that directly.
They are also written in one notation and read back in another
(`{colors={"rgba(3b426199)"},angle=45}` becomes `993b4261 45deg`), so
comparison normalises both sides.
Border COLOUR is deliberately not exposed yet. col.inactive_border is
written by ColorScheme on every scheme change, so a user's choice would
be silently overwritten, and col.active_border is the Prism gradient,
which needs a colour control this app does not have. Shadow offset is
left out for the same reason -- the vec2 support is in place for
whenever the widget exists.
Verified each new option applies and reverts against the live
compositor, and that the schema, enum-map, nav, write and commit/reset
contracts all pass.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
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.