For most of its life, the terminal was the one interface nobody art-directed. It was monospace, it was whatever colours the theme happened to define, and its aesthetic was an accident of what was cheap to render in 1978.
That has changed fast, and unevenly.
What actually improved
Three things in the current wave are genuine improvements rather than decoration.
Ligature-aware typography with real hinting. Reading code for eight hours is a legibility problem, and monospace fonts designed in the last five years are measurably easier on the eye than the bitmap descendants they replaced. Distinguishing zero from O and one from l is not a style choice.
Semantic colour instead of decorative colour. Older tools coloured output because colour was available. Newer ones colour output because a specific token means a specific thing — this path exists, this diff line was removed, this test is skipped rather than failed. When the palette carries meaning consistently, scanning gets faster.
Progressive disclosure of long output. Collapsing a hundred lines of dependency resolution into one line that can be expanded is the single biggest quality-of-life change in modern CLI tooling. It respects that the interesting part is usually four lines long.
What is decoration
Then there is the other half.
Animated spinners that render at sixty frames per second and spend more CPU than the task they are describing. Gradient banner art that scrolls past before you can read it. Progress bars for operations that complete in under 200 milliseconds, which exist purely so the tool feels busy.
The tell is whether the output survives being piped. A well-designed CLI notices it is not writing to a terminal and produces plain, parseable text. A decorated one emits escape codes into your log file and you find out three weeks later.
The unresolved tension
Terminals are used by humans interactively and by scripts non-interactively, and those two audiences want opposite things. Humans want summary, colour, and motion. Scripts want stable, boring, machine-readable lines that never change format between versions.
The tools that handle this well treat them as two output modes with two contracts, and version the machine-readable one. The tools that handle it badly add a --json flag as an afterthought and let the human format drift every release.
The difference shows up the moment you check what a tool does when nobody is watching:
# Interactive: colour, alignment, a summary line for a human
$ deploy status
✔ api v4.2.1 healthy 2m ago
✔ web v4.2.1 healthy 2m ago
! worker v4.2.0 degraded 9m ago
# Piped: no escape codes, no spinner, one stable record per line
$ deploy status | cat
api 4.2.1 healthy 2026-07-28T09:14:02Z
web 4.2.1 healthy 2026-07-28T09:14:02Z
worker 4.2.0 degraded 2026-07-28T09:07:41ZBoth are designed. Only one of them is decorated.
Where it lands
The command line was never actually minimal. It was just unstyled, and people mistook the absence of design for the presence of restraint.
Now that it is being designed on purpose, the question is the same one every interface faces: does this element help someone finish the task, or does it help the tool look serious? The terminal is not exempt from that question. It was only ever avoiding it.
