Everything I build looks like a tiny tv

I have a type, and the type is “terminal program that looks like broadcast gear.” radar tells me what to work on. dial is a CRT-flavored mood journal that used to be called poppy. The statusline is basically a TV guide for my day. Muted palette, runs in a terminal, and one rule I will die on: resizing the window changes the whitespace, never the content. Nothing reflows. It breathes wider.

poppy is where I stopped forcing a metaphor onto a screen. The first version drew color bars everywhere, for every mood, because color bars are what a broken TV shows. Looked great in the mockup, read as noise in the render. Real TVs don’t do one thing. So now each channel speaks its own dialect: fuzzy moods are snow, spent ones are the color bars, a good locked-in one is a clean picture in its own color.

The dumbest and most beloved piece is narrator. Every terminal I open gets a name for the day from a rotating cast. Today’s an Office day, so my terminals are Michael and Pam and, briefly, two Tobys. 187 names, 22 themes, a signature emoji each. Its entire function is that I can ask “what’s Dwight doing” and mean a specific terminal. Completely unnecessary. Not giving it up.

None of this is faster on a spreadsheet. It makes eight hours of healthcare QA feel like running a small, underfunded TV station, which is a nicer thing to do for eight hours.