Application-wide UI/UX review and redesign

[tdeverx]

Overview

Perform a comprehensive design and UX review across the entire application.

This issue is focused on improving the overall product, not preserving existing implementations. Every screen should be evaluated critically and redesigned where necessary. No view, workflow, or feature should be considered final if a better solution exists.

Child issues

• Command palette search and design improvements #5
• Toolbar-first navigation and command surface redesign #9
• Unified creation workflow for images, templates, and Compose #10
• Design system cleanup and user-configurable style primitives #17
• Container widget charts and customization #18

Research / design checklist

• Containers grid and networks
• Container detail: overview
• Container detail: terminal
• Container detail: stats, history, and logs
• Container detail: files
• Container detail: inspect
• Images, templates, stacks, and edit/run form
• Build
• Volumes
• Registries
• System
• System activity
• Customize sheet
• Settings
• Onboarding/bootstrap
• Command palette
• Menu bar extra
• Review empty, loading, error, keyboard, context-menu, drag-and-drop, and multi-selection states.

Implementation checklist

• Move repeated visual behavior into shared primitives where it improves consistency.
• Preserve the classic sidebar fallback while toolbar-first UI remains experimental.
• Keep native macOS patterns as the default unless the product reason says otherwise.
• Update docs/wiki when behavior, terminology, or workflow changes.
• Smoke-test app/UI changes in Contained.app.

Acceptance criteria

• Visual hierarchy and information architecture are clearer across core workflows.
• Major screens have intentional empty, loading, error, and keyboard states.
• Shared design decisions are not duplicated across unrelated views.
• Related child issues are either completed or split into narrower follow-up work.

Related architecture work

• Design-system package direction: Extract a reusable design system package #34
• Navigation/toolbars package direction: Extract navigation, toolbar, panel, and morph infrastructure #35