History / Keybindings

Add a Nix page; document the niri keys and the shortcut palette Nix.md covers both halves of the optional Nix layer, and says up front which is which because they share a language and nothing else: - Nix + Home Manager beside pacman, for a declarative USER environment. Leads with what it is NOT: this is not NixOS, pacman still owns the system, and "declare the whole machine and rebuild it" is a different product. - facts.nix as the bridge — what the machine actually is, probed rather than remembered, so one home.nix reacts to the box instead of being edited per box. - Install profiles: syn-install --config, in Nix or key=value. Semantic keys rather than menu numbers, unused keys reported by name, and the destructive confirmations spelled out one at a time. The two traps get their own headings because both fail silently: managing synuirc from home.nix makes the control panel revert instead of save (Home Manager's files are read-only store symlinks; synui writes that file live), and /etc/synapseos/nix must not be a git repo (flakes copy only tracked files, so a fresh facts.nix evaluates as missing). Keybindings was missing four real binds — Super+/ (and Super+?), the palette that lists everything else, and Super+, / Super+. , the two column moves that are the whole point of the niri layout. Found by running synui's new tests/readme_binds.sh against this page instead of the README; it now passes against both. The-Desktop said four layouts and named four: niri is the fifth in the Super+Tab cycle. It also said the layout "is not remembered across a restart", which layout_state_save() and tests/layout_persist.sh have both contradicted for a while — it is per desktop and it persists. Page and anchor links checked.

velle999 committed Aug 7, 2026

Keybindings: the Super+Space swap toggle, and rofi theming

velle999 committed Aug 6, 2026

Keybindings: rofi on Super+Space, command bar to Super+= Also fixes two errors that predate this change: - Super+Shift+T was listed as Calendar in the System table while the Windows table correctly had it as Retile. It has been retile since 2026-07-31. - The rebinding example had a comma (`super+shift+z, spawn ...`). The line is split on the first whitespace, so the comma became part of the key name and the bind was silently dropped. Documented the punctuation-keysym rule too, since Super+= has to be written super+equal.

velle999 committed Aug 6, 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 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

Add a Gaming page — game mode had no documentation anywhere Game mode existed as one line in a keybind table, one row in the sudo -n table, and a paragraph in synapd about VRAM. Nothing said what triggers it, what it stops, how to stop it stopping things, or that there is a launcher wrapper at all — and synui-game-run, the half that has to be in place BEFORE a game starts, was named once in a command list and never explained. The page covers both halves and, more usefully, why they are separate: game mode acts on a game that is already running, while MangoHud and the governor have to be wrapped around the launch, because you cannot inject an overlay into a process that is already up. Documented from the source rather than from memory: the detection rule (a fullscreen XWayland client, which works because desktop apps are Wayland- native and never match), what it stops and why synapd has to be stopped outright (the wire protocol has no unload or sleep, only RELOAD and SHUTDOWN), the idle hold-off and why a gamepad makes it necessary, the five default exclusions and the fullscreen-video surprise they exist to prevent, and the six synuirc keys with their real defaults. Also the things people actually hit: MANGOHUD=1 only hooks Vulkan so an OpenGL game needs the wrapper; the overlay ships hidden behind Shift_R+F12; gamescope is on the ISO but mangohud and gamemode are optdepends; borderless windowed is not fullscreen; a blank window at the right size is usually the game's own resolution index. Linked from Home, the sidebar, Keybindings, Commands and synui, which all previously dead-ended on the subject.

velle999 committed Jul 26, 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

Document the desktop: sounds, cursors, widgets, the bar and window effects The wiki was last touched at 0.1.8; everything since — the quickshell bar replacing waybar, the cursor and sound managers, desktop widgets and icons, the wlroots 0.20 / scenefx 0.5 port and the glass work — was undocumented. Four new pages: Sound-Themes synui-sound end to end: the ten events and where each is hooked, installing themes from an archive or a plain folder of .oga files, per-event sample picking, and why several spec names resolve to something else. Carries the ghost theme (/usr/share/sounds/alsa silenced a desktop whose switches all said "on") and the `volume` key collision. Cursor-Themes synui-cursor end to end, built around the thing that actually costs people time: opendesktop ships ready-to-use themes and source trees that look identical from outside. Plus the untrusted-archive handling, and the five places a cursor theme has to be written or the desktop disagrees. The-Desktop the bar (and why waybar went), widgets, desktop icons, themes, per-app geometry. Window-Effects the full synuirc knob reference with defaults and ranges, how to tell whose shadow you are looking at, the 50% shadow ceiling shadow_spread lifts, and the seam rule that made the glass halo square on top. Both installers are documented as installers of untrusted archives, because that is what they are: paths re-resolved against the extraction root, and `build` kept CLI-only since it runs the archive's own makefile as you. Keybindings was materially wrong — Super+T has been the theme manager since the task manager lost its second bind, and Alt+Tab, Super+S, Super+Shift+A, Super+Shift+P, Super+V, Super+R, Super+I and the bare media keys were all missing. Regenerated against the bind table in config.c, with the note that a duplicate combo is not a conflict anyone sees, it is the older feature silently going dead. Troubleshooting gains eight entries, all the same shape as the rest of that page: a commit and a pkgrel bump that ship nothing, the ghost sound theme, a nested synui that re-themes the live desktop, quickshell's missing UseQApplication (whose error goes to tty1, not the journal), Nerd Font glyphs silently becoming the empty string, systemd's non-existent inline comments, and `pkill -f` killing the shell that ran it. Also corrected: wlroots 0.19 -> 0.20 and the scenefx fork in Architecture and Building; the collector drift that went four-for-four and is now deduped via <pkg>/mktarball.sh; LUKS2 and dual-boot in Installation, including why /boot stays outside the encrypted root; and the 0.1.5-0.1.9 release history, with the post-0.1.9 work marked unreleased.

velle999 committed Jul 26, 2026

wiki: initial operator's manual Ten pages: installation, keybindings, architecture, per-component pages (synapd, synui, synguard+kmod, synsh), Secure Boot, building/packaging, cutting an ISO release, and a troubleshooting catalogue. The wiki deliberately carries what the README cannot: the failure modes. Nearly every hard bug in this project has been SILENT — a build that exits 0 on stale code, a dkms module that reports installed while being unloadable, a security rule that reports clean because it was reading garbage. Those are written down here with the generalisable lesson attached.

velle999 committed Jul 12, 2026