Terminal experience design review
Objective
Make verified production progress emotionally legible without rewarding noise.
Surface hierarchy
- Status line: tiny peripheral facts—stage, percentage, gate, Hive, approval, retry.
- HUD widget: persistent production truth—contract, progress, evidence, blockers, active work.
- Working message: one sentence describing what is happening this moment.
- Cards: durable meaningful events—validation, Hive mission, blocker, milestone, archive.
- Overlay: deliberate operator choices—run, delegate, validate, evidence, vault, export, theme, settings.
- Expanded tool result: detailed evidence only on demand.
Density modes
| Mode | HUD | Cards | Best use |
|---|---|---|---|
cinematic | Three lines with stage track and coordination cue | Rich details | Focused creative sessions |
rich | Two evidence-focused lines | Detailed | Daily production |
compact | One line | Terse | Split panes and small terminals |
minimal | No widget; status and critical cards only | Essential | Remote/headless-adjacent use |
Motion modes
off: static semantic glyphs.subtle: two-frame pulse only while meaningful work is active.full: four-frame activity cue plus stronger live coordination feedback.
Animation stops with work. Completion is represented by stable state, not perpetual motion.
Reward model
Prominent visual changes are reserved for:
- file-backed evidence accepted;
- blocker opened or resolved;
- agent ownership claimed or handed off;
- deterministic validation passed;
- authoritative stage completed;
- archive decompressed and verified.
A tool merely starting receives only a small activity cue.
Accessibility and correctness
- Semantic theme tokens instead of hard-coded terminal escape sequences.
- Unicode glyphs are supplementary; words and layout retain meaning.
- Components use visual-width utilities and truncate safely.
- Unchanged HUD frames reuse cached line arrays to reduce repaint work.
- Minimal mode and motion-off provide low-stimulation operation.
- POM Nocturne and Parchment preserve corresponding dark/light semantics.