terminal-software-designlisted

# Terminal & Software UI Design Software that is **operated**, not read, follows a different discipline than marketing/landing-page design, where whitespace and a single hero read as quality. In a tool people use for hours a day, whitespace that pushes real content off-screen reads as *unfinished*, not elegant. A naive review pass tends to catch the obvious stuff (contrast, spacing) and miss the failure modes specific to this category: a sidebar that fills 100% of a narrowed window while the actual content disappears, a popover that blends into its own background, a native Electron window bleeding the wrong theme color at its edges before the page even paints. ## Workflow 1. **Read `references/density_and_semantics.md` first** — the core inversion (density is correct here, not a compromise), semantic-vs-brand color, tabular numeric data, and keyboard-first interaction. This is the base judgment everything else builds on. 2. **Read `references/component_patterns.md`** for the specific failure modes in sidebars, popovers/menus, segmented toggles, and sibling surfaces (two panels that are supposed to read as the same UI layer but use different tokens). 3. **Building or reviewing an Electron app?** Read `references/electron_chrome_pitfalls.md` — native window background bleeding at theme boundaries, traffic-light centering, why the in-app theme toggle doesn't automatically reach native chrome. These bugs don't show up in web-only design guides. 4.