launch-hero

The New-Session splash — a terminal-style block-letter SPEXCODE wordmark, themed by the active palette.

The console's New-Session tab greets with a splash in the terminal's own language — the block-letter ASCII wordmark every code CLI opens with (Codex's >_, Gemini's and opencode's ███ block lettering) — instead of an app-icon glyph. The human's direction is the contract here: the launch surface should feel like a terminal, and in a terminal identity is drawn with characters, not vector art.

So the hero is pure text: an ANSI-Shadow SPEXCODE rendered in the app's mono font inside a pre — a rigid character grid, never an image or SVG, so it scales by font-size alone and stays aligned at any width. Its ink is a vertical gradient from the active theme's --blue to --magenta (background-clip: text), which keeps the console's rule that re-theming the app re-inks the console with it — light themes included, no hero-scoped palette. Beneath it there is deliberately no caption — the human retired the ask line — but its slot survives as an equal-height spacer, so the wordmark keeps its breathing room above the input instead of collapsing onto it.

The wordmark is the session-console New tab's only decorative element; everything else on that tab (input, launcher chip, hint line) belongs to the console's launch grammar, not to this node.