tui-navigation-guardrails

To prevent pane focus misalignment in terminal UI navigation, enforce invariants restricting focus changes to the active pane and aligning enter/ctrl-m keybindings within that same pane. This ensures safe, predictable TUI behavior across development workflows.

Standard TUI pane navigation uses deep-pane semantics where l/h movements switch between panes and esc returns to the parent. Reusing these specific navigation keys for unrelated global actions is prohibited to maintain predictable focus behavior.

You need to update tests and design docs for terminal UI navigation changes whenever modifying TUI key handling or focus behavior. An implementation checklist requires reading required docs, adjusting design specs, updating help text, and adding test coverage to ensure alignment.

Only one pane renders an active selected-row state in terminal UIs to enforce a strict invariant guaranteeing that focus and selection never diverge. This design spec rule prevents multiple panes from simultaneously displaying conflicting active selection states.

You cannot reuse terminal UI navigation keys for global actions like opening settings. The guardrails explicitly prevent reusing navigation keys for unrelated global actions to avoid focus hijacking and maintain predictable pane switching behavior.