Nomarchy/agent/BACKLOG.md

Backlog — the prioritized task queue

The forward-looking half of the old docs/ROADMAP.md, reworked as a queue agents can execute. Detailed design notes and decision records stay in docs/ROADMAP.md (referenced as "ROADMAP § "); this file is what's next, in what order.

Rules:

• Agents take the topmost actionable item (see LOOP.md). Finished items are deleted here — the journal + git log are the record; durable design notes get a ✓-entry in docs/ROADMAP.md if worth keeping.
• Item numbers are stable IDs — never renumbered or reused. A gap in the sequence means shipped (or dropped) work; new items take the next free number regardless of tier.
• Tags: [blocked:hw] needs real hardware (see HARDWARE-QUEUE.md) · [human] needs Bernardo · [stuck] two failed attempts, needs help · [big] must be split before starting.
• Agents may append to PROPOSED and Decisions freely; only Bernardo moves items out of PROPOSED into the tiers.

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NOW

(empty — NEXT's top item is the queue head)

NEXT

28. Theme UI review — make every surface stunning [big]

(Raised by Bernardo, 2026-07-05 — placed at the head of NEXT; reorder freely.) A thorough visual pass over the whole themed UI — Waybar (the generated bar AND the summer whole-swaps), rofi menus, swaync, hyprlock, the cheatsheet, ghostty/btop, GTK/Qt, boot splash, greeter — with the bar set at stunning, not merely consistent (pillar 4). Grounded in design theory, not taste alone:

• Color: palette-role relationships that demonstrably work together — harmony models (analogous/complementary accents), perceptual lightness ordering of base→surface→overlay→text (check in OKLCH, not raw hex), accent/warn/bad distinguishable for color-blind users; extend tools/check-theme-contrast.py to encode the adopted rules (it currently guards legibility pairs only).
• Typography & rhythm: a consistent type scale across bar/menus/ OSD, spacing on the ui.gapsIn/gapsOut grid, aligned paddings (the bar's per-module padding vs rofi rows vs swaync toasts).
• Hierarchy: what reads first — bar module ordering/weights, menu title vs rows, toast title vs body; icon weights consistent with the adjacent text. Bernardo has offered image-expert models for designed graphics (wallpapers, logos, glyphs, preview/branding art): an agent slice that needs artwork must STOP and ask ("say the word") instead of shipping programmer-art. Slices: (a) ✓ the audit (2026-07-05, iteration #31 — findings below); (b) palette-level fixes + the extended contrast/harmony checker — P1s ✓ shipped 2026-07-05 (iteration #32): summer-day + flexoki-light subtext/surface/overlay/muted retuned (flexoki to its canonical upstream tones), miasma + kanagawa surfaces raised (kanagawa to sumiInk4); subtext/base ≥ 3 now GATED in check-theme-contrast.py (all 21 pass). P2s ✓ shipped 2026-07-05 (iteration #33): 18 hex retunes across 9 themes (OKLCH hue-preserving minimal raises; canonical where upstream defines one — gruvbox bg4, nord #616e88, latte overlay1, flexoki 600-series statuses for light mode) and the four floors GATED: muted ≥ 2, text/surface ≥ 4.5, accentAlt ≥ 3, warn ≥ 2.5 (21×7 pairings green; audit contrast findings 20 → 1 — miasma's earthy bad stays as identity, good/bad floors stay audit-only so no exemption list was needed). Remaining (b): nothing — further palette work graduates from slices (c)/(d) findings; (c) per-surface polish slices — capture harness ✓ shipped 2026-07-05 (iteration #34): tools/theme-shot.nix boots the themed desktop headlessly at 1080p and screenshots desktop + open root menu (proven on tokyo-night); per-surface punch items from the first full-res review:
  • ✓ rofi keybind hints (shipped iteration #37): dimmed pango hints on root/Tools/System rows, generated from keybinds.nix via the cheatsheet's prettyKeys (single source, can't drift) — capture-verified on tokyo-night.
  • Icon weight mix [human]: full-color Papirus icons in the menus vs all-monochrome bar glyphs — pick: symbolic/monochrome menu icons for one system, or color as the menu's identity. A/B captured on lumon (iteration #46, side-by-side: https://claude.ai/code/artifact/1ccd10fe-4b6f-454a-888d-e7fdf2362b03): B (symbolic) matches the bar's weight but Papirus symbolic coverage has holes (preferences-desktop-theme-symbolic missing — Look & Feel lost its icon) and rofi tints symbolics a fixed dim gray, not the theme text color — going B needs an icon audit + recolor slice. A costs nothing. Awaiting the call; A stays until then.
  • ✓ Bar right-cluster rhythm (shipped iteration #36): group margins before pulseaudio/powerprofile/battery — heads that self-hide degrade to the uniform spacing.
  • ✓ Semantic dim (shipped iteration #36): workspaces + dnd + muted-volume now use @muted (floor-guaranteed by 28b) instead of alpha(@text, 0.5) tints; the CSS comment now documents the new invariant.
  • ✓ compositor backdrop (shipped iteration #35): Hyprland misc:background_color now the theme's base — no more black flash behind a missing/slow wallpaper (glaring on light themes in the summer-day capture).
  • summer-day whole-swap capture reviewed (iteration #35): the authored slate menu + island-pill bar survive the 28b retunes and read as one coherent identity — keep. ✓ placeholder-dim nit fixed (iteration #38: both summer rasi, bg0 at 60% alpha).
  • latte capture reviewed (iteration #38): the generated menu is fully coherent on light themes (zebra rows, retuned surface, blue selected, dimmed hints) — the audit's "dark terminal on latte" preview concern was a stale preview, not a defect. Backdrop probe: misc:background_color IS applied (hyprctl getoption = 0xFFEFF1F5); captures show dark because awww's empty-state layer paints over it in the wallpaper-less VM — on hardware the fix covers its intended window (the pre-awww startup gap).
  • ✓ Harness gap fixed (iteration #44): guest ~/.nomarchy seeded via tmpfiles BEFORE greetd starts the session, so the session's own exec-once wallpaper paint runs (a post-boot testScript seed was too late for exec-once, and a manual re-run fails without WAYLAND_DISPLAY — awww's client socket is display-named). Wallpaper-complete summer-night capture reviewed: lakeside night scene + cream inverted bar + menu-over-scene all cohere; the placeholder dim (#2d353b99) renders. Note: summer-night's cream bar/menu on dark backdrop is the authored inverted design (fg as surface), not a rendering bug.
  • ✓ Identity-theme capture + stub purge (iteration #45): the lumon capture exposed that catppuccin/lumon/nord/retro-82 shipped stub waybar.css files (2–14 lines, from the f211ef0 rewrite import) — and a theme waybar.css whole-swaps the ENTIRE generated stylesheet, so those four ran an unstyled default bar. Stubs deleted; re-capture confirms lumon falls back to the generated styled bar (workspace pill, padded right cluster). Their full ~110-line rofi.rasi designs kept. Real whole-swaps remain only summer-day/night (+ nord/retro-82 lost nothing: the stubs had no design). (d) the whole-swap themes brought to the same bar (module parity verified textually 2026-07-05: whole-swaps carry every functional module; omitting cpu/memory is identity). Visual work is V3-bound by nature — screenshots are the review artifact, hardware confirms.

Audit findings (slice a — tools/audit-theme-design.py over all 21 palettes + visual pass over previews; identity-aware curation):

• P1 · invisible-secondary-text palettes ✓ fixed iteration #32 (summer-day subtext #6e828a, surface #efe7d0; flexoki-light to canonical Flexoki: surface #E6E4D9, overlay #B7B5AC, subtext #6F6E69, muted #878580). Gate added.
• P1 · inverted bg stacks ✓ fixed iteration #32 (miasma surface #2e2e2e; kanagawa surface #2a2a37 = upstream sumiInk4). Note learned: in this palette model overlay is a MID-TONE (borders/dim, catppuccin semantics), not a third bg tier — the dark-theme overlay==muted pattern is intentional.
• P2 · muted floor: muted-on-base < 2.0 on gruvbox (1.27), everforest (1.55), lumon (1.68), nord (1.69), white (1.82), latte (1.91), retro-82 (1.93) — dimmed workspaces/inactive items barely render (visible on the lumon preview). Adopt ≥ 2.0 and retune.
• P2 · warn barely reads: warn-on-base ≈ 2.0–2.3 on rose-pine, summer-day, latte, flexoki-light — this is the bar's 25%-battery color. Floor 2.5 (or see the color-only rule below).
• P2 · text-on-surface < 4.5: ristretto 3.88, latte 4.39 (menus and chips draw text on surface).
• P3 · accentAlt-on-base < 3: latte 2.34, summer-day 2.83.
• Design rule (systemic, beats palette surgery): status is never color-only. good/warn collapse under protanopia on ~half the themes and good/bad under deuteranopia (59 pair-findings) — that's inherent to red/green/yellow, not fixable per-palette. Battery and recording already carry glyph changes; sweep the remaining color-only indicators (updates count, notification dot, VPN shield states) for shape/glyph redundancy.
• Identity exemptions, made explicit: vantablack + white (deliberately hueless statuses), lumon (all-blue), hackerman (matrix green statuses), matte-black/retro-82 (off-family hues) are identity, not defects — slice (b)'s checker gets a per-theme exemption list instead of silently lowered floors.
• ANSI / greeter notes: latte, rose-pine and white ship ansi[0] LIGHTER than ansi[15] — decide the light-theme ANSI convention (terminals conventionally keep black dark) before the greeter/tty theming ships to them. tokyo-night/summer-night ansi[7]-on-ansi[0] ≈ 2.8–3.0 = the greeter's muted text; fine as muted, watch on hardware.
• Visual pass (480×270 previews — too small for type/spacing; the deep per-surface pass needs 1080p captures): the generated bar's right cluster runs ~9 modules with uniform spacing — no grouping rhythm (consider micro-gaps between tray/net · stats · toggles · battery/notify groups); latte's preview shows a DARK terminal on the light desktop — verify ghostty consumes the latte palette (or the preview is stale); summer-day's island-pill whole-swap bar and lumon's globe identity are strong — preserve through any polish.

14. Automated lock bumps — confirm the first real run

Slices b+c shipped 2026-07-05 (.gitea/workflows/bump.yml): weekly schedule (Mon 05:17 UTC) + workflow_dispatch as the security fast-lane; nix flake update → eval gate → pathspec-limited lock commit pushed to main on green (that push triggers check.yml as the second net). Update/commit/push logic simulated locally end-to-end in a scratch clone, incl. a real update; today's bumped lock evals green. Remaining (not confirmable from a session): the first scheduled or dispatched run must land — watch that the runner picks up the cron and that the Actions token can push. Then delete this item. Item 20's KVM runner later upgrades the gate from eval-only to the VM suite.

20. KVM runner → VM suite in CI [human]

The remaining stretch of the CI item — checks-on-push is live and green (run #58; runner = gitea/act_runner docker, eval tier). Register a second runner on a host with /dev/kvm + nix (host-mode label nix-kvm), then an agent uncomments the workflow's vm-checks job: the checks.* VM suite + real toplevel/HM builds on every push (also upgrades item 14's bump gate from eval-only to the full suite).

18. "nomarchy" control center + first-boot welcome [big]

ROADMAP § control center. A single front-end over the common toggles on the same nomarchy-theme-sync surface, + a first-boot guided "pick your theme / essentials" flow. Needs a design pass (TUI vs GUI) → write options into Decisions before implementing. Note: items 9–11 (rollback menu, doctor, validation) are natural panels of it — design them as composable commands, not dead ends.

LATER

• Wallpapers artifact split (ROADMAP § Faster switches — decided, deferred): pinned Nomarchy-wallpapers input so a state write stops re-copying 86 MB. Follow-on: pre-built theme variants if switches are still slow after.
• Installer round 2 (ROADMAP § Installer): multi-disk BTRFS RAID, impermanence, BIOS/legacy boot.
• Boot-from-snapshot: a systemd-boot equivalent of grub-btrfs.
• Night-light geo mode: lat/long auto sunset/sunrise (means wlsunset).
• Per-theme icon overrides / more icon packs (ROADMAP § Icon themes).
• MIPI/IPU software-ISP camera support (no-UVC machines).
• VPN exit-node richer display (country/city) (optional).
• NixOS release bump → v2 [human]: deliberate, hand-edited, never automated; the previous attempt was discarded (2026-06-22) over a Hyprland OOM blocker — see MEMORY.md before retrying (NOW#3 should also soften that blocker class).

PROPOSED (agent suggestions — await human triage)

Agents: append here with a one-paragraph pitch (what/why/cost). Do not implement. Bernardo moves accepted items into a tier.

• Menu parity for downstream-flake options (raised by Bernardo, 2026-07-04, from the hardware sweep): anything the docs or the hardware queue ask a user to hand-edit into the downstream flake (keyboard.layout multi-layout, power.batteryChargeLimit, updates.enable, services.printing, …) should have a menu toggle instead — the in-flake-state philosophy already gives the menu a write-into-the-flake path, and night-light / auto-timezone / auto-commit prove the pattern (incl. rebuild-on-first-enable). Pitch: (a) an audit listing every user-facing nomarchy.* option vs its menu surface; (b) menu writers for the gaps, respecting the toggle-vs-package discipline (bare template packages stay hand-edits) and menu-placement convention (right submenu, root stays short). Values beyond booleans (layout lists, charge thresholds) need a small input UI per option. Cost: audit is one iteration; the writers a few more, sliceable per option.

• Portal/Flatpak camera picker still lists the internal IR sensor (ROADMAP § Webcam follow-up). The shipped IR-hide is a WirePlumber v4l2 rule, but Flatpak/portal apps consume cameras via the libcamera path, where both sensors remain visible — a Flatpak Zoom user can still pick the black IR "camera". Options, roughly ascending cost: (a) do nothing — document it (portal camera support is still rare in practice); (b) a WirePlumber libcamera monitor rule disabling GREY-only nodes — needs verifying that libcamera monitor rules can match early enough (the v4l2 investigation found only device.api binds pre-rule, which is why surgical scoping failed before — same wall likely applies); (c) a libcamera configuration/udev quirk hiding the IR sensor at the libcamera layer itself. Cost: (b)/(c) need a T14s-style RGB+IR machine to verify → pairs with a hardware-queue session. Recommend (a) now, (b) investigated when the T14s is next available.

Decisions [human]

Open calls only Bernardo can make; agents add options/evidence but never decide.

• Formatter adoption: repo deliberately has none; nixfmt-rfc-style would flatten the aligned hand-formatting of ~33 files. Adopt or declare never?
• Docs site vs Markdown-in-repo (from the docs-review item).
• Control center form factor: TUI (gum/ratatui-style) vs GUI vs "the rofi menu is the control center, just add a first-boot flow".
• zram swap: faster under pressure and pairs with NOW#3, but it interacts with the hibernation-swapfile story (resume device/priority ordering) — adopt, adopt-with-hibernation-guard, or skip?
• Default browser: the template comments Firefox out. The shipped mime defaults (item 8, done) point text/html/http(s) at firefox.desktop as inert entries — they activate the moment Firefox is installed and are skipped otherwise, so the remaining call is only: ship a browser active in the suite, or stay browserless-by-default?