shep is a process manager written in Rust. The sheep are a mnemonic, not a costume — so the personality lives in prose, illustration and color, and drops out the moment a misread would cost someone a process.
One managed process. Singular only — a set of them is the flock, never "sheeps" and never a bare plural.
A plugin the shepherd supervises for its own sake: metrics, bark. Dogs work for the shepherd. A dog is never the daemon.
Lowercase always, even at the start of a sentence — it is the binary's name. Bricolage Grotesque 800, tracking −5%.
Cream paper and ink carry every surface. Meadow is the only color that means "this works". The other four are earned: one for alerts, one for attention, one for reference, one for links.
Status text is the daemon's own word, lowercase, never restyled into a friendlier one.
shep logs is the same command asshep bleats, and always will be.
An adopted dog runs at the shepherd's own trust level, with no isolation beyond it.
One outline weight, one shadow, no blur. Everything that moves is an idle loop — nothing animates in response to scrolling except the sky.
Give any two animals different durations and offset delays. Two sheep bobbing in lockstep reads as a loading spinner.
One fixed gradient behind the whole scene, night at the top to afternoon at the bottom. Scrolling moves you through the day; nothing else reacts to scroll.
A pale far band and a saturated near band, both 4px outlined, both cropped past the viewport edge so no seam shows.
Barn red belongs to walls and roofs only. It never becomes a status, a button, or a border on a UI surface.
Three to five sheep and exactly one dog per scene. The dog stands apart from the flock — it watches, it is not counted.
Four registers, and knowing which one you are in is most of the job.
Fifteen words carry the whole product. Get them right and the interface explains itself; get them wrong and no amount of illustration saves it.