webOS-fan card overview: headless-QEMU evidence

Evidence for openspec/changes/the-shell-behaves-as-one-coherent-system slice A, revised to the user’s chosen direction: a webOS-style card “fan” (2-3 cards visible at once, real icon + app name above each card) rather than a wider single-card carousel, then a sizing/polish pass driven directly by board feedback (installed w51crww9) and a real-glass scroll-physics report.

Method

tools/capture-webos-fan-switcher.py, run against the real nix build .#card-shell cross-built riscv64 Sway under qemu-riscv64-static user-mode emulation (the same headless-QEMU + card-appearance-socket path tools/capture-bare-app-cards.py and tests/test_card_shell_appearance_runtime.py already use), at the real panel size (568x1232). Three synthetic card-composition-probe-client windows are mapped as k230.card.one/two/three, matched via StartupWMClass to locally-written .desktop fixtures naming the real identities this repo’s own shell uses for its three built-in apps (nix/handheld-desktop-entries.nix: Terminal/foot, Monitor/htop, Files/folder). XDG_DATA_DIRS points at those fixtures plus a real foot/htop/Yaru-icon-theme closure (nix/handheld-theme-icons), so nix/card-shell/icon.c resolves against real installed icon files — both PNG and SVG (via librsvg) — not a stub; this is the same fix that closed the board-reported gap (“Monitor” showed a letter badge, not a real icon, under the real installed theme). Each window is marked card_shell ordinary, floating enable, resize set 100 ppt 100 ppt, move position 0 0 — the same recipe the real shell uses for an ordinary app window — rather than a small fixed floating size; an earlier capture generation used a smaller, inconsistent fixture size and showed an odd-looking overlapping card and a broken composite “opened” frame, both artifacts of that fixture, not of card-shell, and both are gone with this recipe. K230_ICON_THEME=Yaru is set explicitly for this capture; the active theme’s own icon_theme (report.json, followed automatically via appearance_apply) is not exercised by this fixture, which uses the bundled default/synthesized-light report/appearance pair directly, neither of which sets that field. Touch is injected through the real card_shell test-touch IPC path (SWAY_K230_CARD_TEST_INPUT=1, nix/card-shell/test-input.c), the same synthetic-touch fixture tests/test_card_shell_*_runtime.py use, driving the real seatop_touch_down/motion/up -> card_shell_down/motion/up -> cs_down/cs_motion/cs_up path, not a policy-only unit-test shortcut.

This is headless-QEMU proof (real cross-built compositor code, real IPC, real synthetic touch), not board/panel/real-finger touch proof. No board or /dev/ttyACM0 access was used.

Sequence captured, per theme (dark = the bundled default Catppuccin-Mocha

generation; light = a synthesized Catppuccin-Latte-like palette through the same real report.json/appearance.json path capture-bare-app-cards.py already establishes as legitimate, since this repo has no bundled light theme in-tree)

01-overview — card_shell enter with the middle app (Monitor) focused: the fan shows the selected card at roughly half the panel’s width and 60% of its height, vertically centered between the title and the “Swipe up for apps” hint, with a legible peek of its neighbour(s). Each card carries a resolved icon (Yaru’s Monitor/Files glyphs, foot’s own hicolor glyph for Terminal — confirmed real icons, not a letter badge, including an icon reached only through SVG) at 36px, and its real .desktop Name= at 20px above the card, never the raw window title.
02-scrolling / 03-scrolled-settled — a fast ~8ms-cadence horizontal drag and release: the fling’s projected velocity carries the selection past the adjacent card (a multi-card jump, not a one-card snap), and 03 (captured after the momentum coast’s own — now fling-distance-scaled, up to ~760ms — settle window) shows the newly-selected card resting exactly centered, not mid-animation.
04-after-close — a flick-up throw on the selected card: it closes (card-composition-probe-client accepts the xdg_toplevel close by default), the deck’s status reads “App closed”, and the remaining two cards re-flow with no overlap artifact.
05-opened — a plain tap on the remaining selected card: a clean, full-bleed single-app frame (the “ordinary maximized” fixture fixes the earlier composite/overlap artifact from a smaller, inconsistent floating window size), confirming the compositor left CS_DECK.

What this does not show

Real board/finger touch, optical legibility, or panel colour rendering (UNVERIFIED; no board access was used).
The exact card size/text/icon “looking right” at arm’s length — a host/QEMU render is not an on-glass legibility check.
Live appearance-driven icon-theme switching in practice: appearance_apply now calls card_icon_set_theme whenever a loaded report names an icon_theme, but this fixture’s own report/appearance pair does not set that field, so only the K230_ICON_THEME env/hicolor default path is exercised here, not the report-driven one.
The exact left/right neighbour a given app lands as: p->cards[]’s insertion order follows this fixture’s own window-mapping order, which is not deterministically tied to --app-id launch order; the dark and light captures show different neighbour arrangements for this reason, and neither is a claim about production ordering.

Commands

nix build .#card-shell --max-jobs 1 --cores 6 --no-link --print-out-paths
SWAYBIN=$(nix-store -qR <that path> | grep -m1 sway-unwrapped-riscv64)/bin/sway
python3 tools/capture-webos-fan-switcher.py --sway "$SWAYBIN" \
  --client <host-arch nix/card-composition-probe-client build> \
  --icon-roots <symlinkJoin of pkgs.foot, pkgs.htop, nix/handheld-theme-icons> \
  --output /tmp/k230-fs-N