Terminal UX

How a terminal program should behave. Two different things live here and their rules diverge:

• CLI: a command that runs, prints, and exits. No persistent screen. State is communicated by printing what changed.
• TUI: a full-screen interactive app that owns the terminal until it quits. A grid that redraws.

Every rule below says which it applies to. A CLI rule does not automatically hold for a TUI, and the sources differ: clig.dev, the 12-factor CLI writeup, GNU, and POSIX are CLI-first, while the TUI material comes from ratatui, Bubble Tea, Textual, and accessibility practitioners.

How solid a rule is:

• convention: documented in a widely-adopted guide or standard.
• house style: one project's stated choice. Reasonable, not universal.
• unmarked: reasoning by analogy from graphical UI, with nothing behind it. Weigh it lower.

Terminal accessibility gets its own file, references/accessibility.md. There is no WCAG equivalent for terminals, so nothing there is a conformance floor. Read it anyway: it holds the one rule most likely to make a TUI unusable for someone.