dmellok/tesserae v0.29.0

v0.29.0 — Themes rebuild + colour pipeline + admin maturity

on GitHub

v0.29.0 — Themes rebuild + colour pipeline + admin maturity

The first cut tag since v0.16.26. Three big workstreams plus the
usual tail of polish.

Heads-up: the intermediate tags v0.16.27 through v0.28.2 carry
the granular history if you want commit-by-commit detail. This
release rolls them up.

🎨 Themes — rebuilt end-to-end

The v0.16.27 purge stripped the pre-Spectra theme system; v0.29
brings it back with a real builder, image-to-theme extraction, and
a unified browse + edit page. Top-nav → Themes.

• 19 bundled themes across Light / Dark / Movement / base16. Any
  theme composes with any of the 9 bundled data-style axes
  (Standard / Display / Editorial / Mono / Elegant / Condensed +
  Bauhaus / De Stijl / Brutalist).
• Unified layout — vertical strip of every theme on the left,
  the builder pane in the middle, sticky preview on the right.
  Bundled themes show "Duplicate to edit"; user themes are
  editable with live preview tracking every input.
• Image-to-theme — upload a photo or poster, k-means picks
  dominant colours, the assignment heuristic spreads them across
  the Spectra tokens (light/dark mode auto-detected). Calibration
  source data ported from
  paperlesspaper/epdoptimize
  (Apache 2.0).
• Auto-derive soft tints switch — accent_N_soft becomes
  mix(accent_N, bg, 0.78) on the fly when on. One less thing to
  tune.
• User themes persist at data/themes/user.json and ride along
  in the data-export ZIP. Cascade emitted from /themes/user.css
  loaded alongside the bundled Spectra blocks on every composed
  page.

🖨️ Colour pipeline

• Opt-in calibrated palette + tone mapping for the esp32_bin
  and pi_bin renderers. Per-device toggle dithers Floyd-Steinberg
  against the panel's measured Spectra 6 / ACeP colours instead of
  nominal sRGB primaries, paired with a linear tone-map pre-pass
  that squeezes the source range into the calibrated black/white
  band so the dither has room to spread error. Off by default —
  A/B with your own content since the trade-off is content-dependent
  (chromatic content tends to gain, neutral greys can pick up a
  slight cool cast because the calibrated white is faintly green-blue).
• Firmware-native panel orientation auto-detected from the
  panel preset. The renderer packs at the firmware's row stride
  regardless of how the user mounts the panel, fixing the office
  Waveshare 13.3" appearing distorted after rotation.
• Pre-v0.20 ESP32 manifest backfill — a startup migration adds
  native_w / native_h to existing esp32_client instance
  manifests so legacy installs paint at the right stride without
  a re-add.
• Eight dither modes for the .bin packers: FS, none, Atkinson,
  Jarvis-Judice-Ninke, Stucki, Bayer-8x8, halftone, crosshatch.

🔐 Admin maturity

• Change / disable / re-enable password from Settings → System
  → Authentication. With the gate disabled, the server still 403s
  public IPs and only lets LAN traffic through — "trust LAN", not
  "trust the internet".
• tesserae --reset-password CLI escape hatch for when the
  password is lost.
• Firmware splash PNGs at nine common sizes
  (64 → 1024px) under static/brand/firmware/ for client
  builders that want a boot image without re-running Pillow on
  the device.
• Dev dropdown in the top-nav (under --dev) groups the Widget
  gallery + Theme × style matrix.

✨ Editor / UI polish

• Reactive editor: floating back-to-top FAB on small viewports.
  Drag along the bottom to flip side; preference persists.
• Composer remounts cells on theme / style / font flip so the
  new cascade actually paints instead of inheriting stale variables.
• Single-card palette in the theme builder — surfaces, text,
  and the six accent pairs collapsed into one card with sub-group
  headings.
• F1 widget pass: bolder track stroke, backing card behind the
  track, team-colour stripe on standings rows, more Phosphor icons.
• Weather suite visual punch: shaded line chart in
  weather_hourly (12h default), cqmin-scaled hero icon in
  weather_now, AQI scale in weather_air_quality, compass rose
  in weather_wind, tile cards in weather_pollen_count.

📚 Docs

• README + wiki refreshed against current state (widget count, theme
  tally, palette token count, removed-feature scrub).
• dev/writing-a-plugin.md rewritten for Spectra — drops the
  pre-purge --c-* / --theme-* / variant-cell-option doctrine;
  introduces the semantic-token list, the data-style axis, and
  the seven body archetypes.
• NOTICES.md added crediting paperlesspaper/epdoptimize.

Removed (vs v0.16.26)

• The pre-v0.16.27 widget --c-bg / --c-fg / --c-data-* /
  --c-ok/warn/danger token cascade. Spectra widgets paint from
  --bg, --surface, --text-primary, --accent-1..6, etc.
  directly. --c-zoom survived as the cell-content-zoom variable.
• variant cell option from widget manifests — one widget composes
  with every (theme, style) pair now.
• plugins/themes_core/ plugin — themes live in
  static/style/spectra-*.css + a Python registry, not the plugin
  tree.
• scripts/capture_widget_variants.py — superseded by
  /_test/matrix for cross-theme / cross-style comparison.

Migration notes

• User themes from before the purge never existed under
  v0.16.x's themes_core path on most installs; if you had one
  hand-edited at data/plugins/themes_core/user.json, move it to
  data/themes/user.json. The schema fields changed (20 Spectra
  tokens instead of the pre-purge 15), so opening it in the new
  builder and re-saving is the cleanest path.
• ESP32 device manifests missing native_w / native_h are
  backfilled at startup the first time you boot v0.29.0; nothing
  for users to do.
• Per-widget variant pickers are gone from the editor. Existing
  saved pages keep working — the field just isn't read anymore —
  but the same widget will render in whichever theme + style the
  page picks. If you relied on a specific variant for a specific
  cell, set a cell-level theme / style override instead.

Install / upgrade: docs.tesserae.
Full changelog: CHANGELOG.md.