Unofficial. Not affiliated with or endorsed by postmarketOS, Phosh or GNOME. Do not report problems with this plugin to them; open an issue here.

Experimental. No warranty, see COPYING.

AI-assisted. See AI.md.

NFC quick setting

A phosh quick setting that turns the NFC radio on and off, so reaching NFC costs one swipe instead of a trip through Settings.

Not a phosh fork. phosh publishes a phosh-plugins pkg-config and a public phosh-plugin.h exactly so plugins can live out of tree, and its own caffeine, dark-mode and location tiles are the pattern this follows: a PhoshQuickSetting subclass with a .ui template, registered into the phosh-quick-setting-widget extension point from a GIOModule.

Build and install

Needs phosh's development files (the phosh-plugins and libphosh-0.45 pkg-config modules), GTK 3 and GLib.

meson setup _build
meson compile -C _build
meson install -C _build

The plugin installs into the directory phosh loads quick settings from, which phosh-plugins names. On postmarketOS, the package is temp/phosh-nfc-quick-setting in porthole-dev/pmaports, built from this repository's release tarballs.

Then list it alongside the tiles already enabled:

gsettings set sm.puri.phosh.plugins quick-settings \
  "['wifi-hotspot-quick-setting', 'mobile-data-quick-setting', 'nfc-quick-setting']"

phosh scans its plugin directory once, at startup, so a newly installed tile appears after phosh restarts, not when the gsetting changes. Changing the setting alone logs Custom quick setting 'nfc-quick-setting' not found.

Two things it has to know about neard

No helper is needed to switch the radio. neard's bus policy carries <policy at_console="true"><allow send_destination="org.neard"/>, so the logged-in user may write org.neard.Adapter Powered directly. Verified from the session with plain busctl.

neard refuses to power down while a poll loop is running. An app left scanning holds the radio up, and the property write comes back org.neard.Error.Failed, which from the outside looks like a broken tile. So turning off stops the poll loop first and then powers the adapter down. Turning on is a single write.

Why the tile does not wait for the radio

Powering an NFC controller is not instant, and a tile that only moves once neard confirms reads as a tile that ignores you: press it twice quickly and the second press sees the old state and asks for the same thing again, queueing work behind work.

So the tile follows the request, not the radio. A press flips what is on screen immediately and asks neard for that; a press while a request is in flight only moves the target, and whichever request is running reconciles when it lands. Only one request exists at a time however hard the tile is pressed, and the radio's own PropertiesChanged has the last word once nothing is pending.

Measured on device: the tile responds in 0.6ms, the radio catches up in 64ms, and five presses as fast as they can be delivered settle correctly in 262ms.

What it shows

The tile hides itself where there is no adapter, which is nearly every machine, the same way the Settings page hides its row. Its status page links to Settings' own NFC page through phosh's panel.launch-panel action, so the permission list is one tap from the radio switch.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later, see COPYING.