History / Development Notes

Document synfiles — it has been the default file manager and was in neither the wiki nor the README The gap the Antiquity credit left behind, again: synfiles replaced Dolphin as what a folder opens in, ships on the ISO and is in syn-update's components — and appeared on **no page a user reads**. The only mention of a file manager anywhere in this wiki was a Dolphin context-menu action and a Dolphin Troubleshooting entry. New **Files** page: the window (tabs, split view, the three view modes, thumbnails, tree, drag-and-drop), the keyboard, the trash and undo rules, properties including the new resolution row, service menus, places, volumes, archives, search, settings with their real defaults, `--rec` for scripts, and how to get Dolphin back. - _Sidebar and Home: Files listed under "Using it", beside Software. - Commands: a `synfiles` row; `synui-wine-run` is a right-click action in both file managers, not "a Dolphin context-menu action". - The Desktop: a short section pointing at the page, and what a desktop drop does. - Troubleshooting: which application opens a folder is decided by mimeapps.list and how to change it (including a folder opening in a terminal, which is the same mechanism with no entry set); the Dolphin "Open With" entry now says Files does not use that index; and no resolution for .mkv/.webm/.avi means ffmpeg is not installed. - Development Notes, two entries, both generalisable: - two renderings of one row are two places to forget — drag-and-drop and then rename were each wired into the list delegate only, and a control whose state is set but not drawn reads as a dead button; plus the reverse-paint-order rule for a row-wide MouseArea, and how to drive a quickshell app with no display (and why the probe must be run against the shipped file too). - a bounds check turns a wrong answer into no answer, which is how you find it — validate the parsed value, expect short reads, and decide a format by magic rather than by its extension. Both link checkers pass.

velle999 committed Aug 12, 2026

Screen recording, syn resolve, and credit for the Antiquity shell The Antiquity bar has shipped since 0.2.7 and was documented in neither the README nor here, which also meant diinki was uncredited in anything a user reads. The Desktop now covers both shells, `bar_shell`, and the fact that Antiquity is her work under MIT, with the Indian Type Foundry credit clause the bundled faces carry. Recording gained a constant frame rate and a `--edit` mezzanine mode, and `syn resolve` was never listed at all: - Commands: `syn resolve`, and what synui-record now does. - Troubleshooting: three symptom-first entries. The important one is that a recording refusing to open in DaVinci Resolve is not a broken file and not a missing codec — the free edition on Linux decodes neither H.264 nor AAC, so no package fixes it and `syn resolve transcode` is the answer. - Development Notes: two lessons. A container's "frame rate" may be its timebase, which is one field causing three unrelated-looking symptoms; and a validated argument is not a dispatched one, where a build script accepted a component name, built nothing and exited 0. - Building and Packaging: that is a fifth instance of the two-collectors drift, recorded next to the other four. Page links and cross-page anchors checked; nothing here names a machine.

velle999 committed Aug 8, 2026

Split synui into the user page and the contributor notes; niri in the layouts synui.md was three audiences stacked on one page: a feature list, ~85 lines of compositor internals, and a config section that mixed "how you configure this" with "change one, change all three". 217 lines down to 160, and the split is by reader rather than by topic. - Header said "Tiling + monocle layouts". There are five. It now names them and points at The-Desktop for what each does. - Features regrouped under Shell / Look / Hardware / AI and security so it can be skimmed, with a what-you-want table at the top. - Every pkgrel reference dropped (154, 163, 183, 192, 197). "Replaced waybar in pkgrel 154" is release history; a reader wants to know the bar is quickshell. - "Hard-won rules for working on synui" moved to Development Notes as "Compositor traps", which is where the cross-cutting ones already lived and where that page already pointed for them. - "Reset signal dispositions" was NOT moved: Development Notes already has "Inherited signal dispositions", same three burns, better written. It was a duplicate, so the page now cross-references instead. - "Session env vars live in three places" went with it — a contributor trap sitting in a user-facing config section. - The state-file rule got the practical form it was missing: if editing synuirc appears to do nothing, a panel has already written that setting. The-Desktop's layout TABLE still had four rows — the prose above it was fixed last time and the table was not, which is the half that gets read. niri now has a row and a section of its own: the strip, the two column moves, and why a column that does not fit is not drawn at all rather than cut off at the edge. Also corrects the geometry note. It said tiling and AI ignore remembered per-app geometry; layout_restore_geometry() gates on tiling, niri AND ai, so three layouts ignore it, not two. Page and anchor links checked.

velle999 committed Aug 7, 2026

Document the four layouts and what monocle does Super+Tab had one wiki row (Cycle layout) and nothing anywhere explained the four layouts it cycles, so the most-pressed layout key on the system was also the least documented one. The-Desktop gains a Layouts section: the cycle order, that layout is per-desktop and resets at login, a table of the four, the floating/ maximize/snap trap that leaves a tiling desktop with nothing to tile, and a Monocle subsection - one window per monitor, change it with the normal focus keys, floating windows exempt (so Super+F is how you get two things on screen), not fullscreen, remembers per-app geometry. Keybindings: the Super+Tab row now names the cycle and says plainly that it does not switch windows, which is what it reads as next to Alt+Tab two rows above; adds the missing Super+Shift+T retile row. Development-Notes: two pieces of state that must agree, updated from only one side - the monocle visibility bug, why a bug that any later action masks reads as imagined, and deriving at the choke point rather than in each caller.

velle999 committed Jul 31, 2026

Document the installer rebuild, synguard enforcement, and kitty The wiki stopped at 2026-07-28 and the whole synguard-to-now range was undocumented. Installation.md still described a single ext4-and-GRUB installer that no longer exists. Installation — install modes now include ADVANCED (partition it yourself, then name the partitions), plus the filesystem table, the bootloader table and what each implies for the ESP, snapshots, swap and zram. Marked with what is actually published: 0.2.4 has ERASE/ALONGSIDE only, everything else is on main and needs a self-built ISO. synguard — the enforcement model had no page anywhere. Adds the two paths (post-hoc SIGKILL vs the in-kernel BPF-LSM gate) and why they are not equivalent, the mode/flag split, the four things the gate cannot do, the two cases where a DENY stands down, how to read the stats line, and how to test a deny rule without killing your own session. synsh — kitty is the default terminal; foot is kept as the CPU-rendered rescue. Includes the dynamic_background_opacity trap, which cannot be fixed after the fact. Terminal references updated across Commands, synui, Window-Effects and Gaming. Development Notes — five new entries, all from silent failures: systemd dependency lists are additive-only so a drop-in cannot remove one; socket-activated services resurrect a daemon you stopped, over the network; an indented heredoc terminator swallows code while bash -n passes; a prompt after a long step answers itself from typeahead; grep -q in a pipeline under pipefail makes "must be absent" checks pass vacuously.

velle999 committed Jul 30, 2026

Document wallpapers end to end, plus the mixer New Wallpapers page: the Super+W picker and its keys, per-monitor scoping and scaling modes, the wallpaper.state-over-synuirc rule, and the whole Wallpaper Engine path — how to get the package, every synui-wpengine command, the files and env vars, what renders and what doesn't, and why synui has to restart the engine after a suspend. Also: the bar's new mixer, wallpaper symptoms in Troubleshooting, the two generalisable lessons in Development Notes (a running process is not a working one; an flock belongs to the open file description), and Home's stale 0.1.x status line.

velle999 committed Jul 27, 2026

Make Troubleshooting a user's page; move the engineering history out Troubleshooting had become a development changelog — bugs *we* hit, told as history, with commit hashes and the internal test rigs used to find them. That is not what someone reaches for when their machine is misbehaving, and a lot of it described one particular machine rather than the system. Troubleshooting is now symptom-first and about the reader's computer: no sound from event sounds, an installed cursor theme that won't appear, a giant pointer in one app, the bar gone, a widget eating clicks, games on the wrong monitor, black screen after suspend, being locked out with no VT, pacman 404s, a module that won't load after a kernel upgrade, the AI not answering, Secure Boot enrollment, a LUKS header you didn't back up. Each entry says what to run. The engineering material moves to a new Development-Notes page, which keeps the generalisable rules — a commit is not an install, dkms status is not a health check, /etc units shadow /usr/lib ones, signal dispositions survive exec, tightening a check must handle the values already sitting on the wrong side — without the narrative or the machine it happened on. Also removed personal and machine-specific detail from the pages added in ae733c0: a named USB volume knob, downloaded archive names, which apps had which shadow, screen widths, monitor names, and the private-desktop state that prompted the sound-theme fix. The rules they illustrate all still stand on their own, stated generally. The one home path in Building-and-Packaging is now $HOME. Fixed two dead anchors that predate this batch (synui#game-mode and synui#task-manager pointed at bold text, not headings) and verified every internal link and cross-page anchor resolves.

velle999 committed Jul 26, 2026