TUI Visual Design and Aesthetic Polish

Use this skill when a terminal UI needs to look deliberate, elegant, readable, and production-grade, not merely functional. Good TUI design is the craft of using cells, text, whitespace, color, borders, glyphs, rhythm, and motion under harsh terminal constraints.

Design operating principles

1. Start with information architecture. Decide what the user must notice first, what is secondary, and what can be hidden until requested.
2. Design in cells. Every visual decision consumes fixed-width character cells. Padding, borders, scrollbars, and icons must earn their space.
3. Use fewer treatments, consistently. A polished TUI usually has one border language, one spacing scale, one heading system, and semantic color roles.
4. Prefer calm defaults. High-intensity color, heavy borders, inverse video, animation, and icons should highlight state changes or actions, not decorate every element.
5. Make degradation intentional. Every visual design should still work in no-color, ASCII, narrow-width, light theme, remote SSH, and screen-reader-friendly modes.

Visual hierarchy and composition

Create hierarchy with, in order: placement, spacing, grouping, text labels, alignment, weight, then color. Do not make color carry the entire hierarchy.