The Workspace

The panels

• Arrangement — the timeline (always present), with the track-header column at its right.
• Loop Deck — the clip launcher, docked left of the lanes (Tab).
• Browser — files, devices, plug-ins, library, grooves (⌘⌥B), on the left.
• Engineer — the agent chat column, on the left.
• Mixer — the bottom band.
• Device dock — the selected track's chain, in the bottom band.
• The clip editor slot — one shared bottom-band tenant that hosts whichever editor you opened last: the Piano Roll, the Step Grid, the Sampler editor, or the Audio Clip View (one at a time; double-clicking the relevant clip or instrument opens it).

Separate windows (one instance each): Export, Preferences, the plug-in scanner, Sign In, and hosted plug-ins' own editors.

Resizing: the Engineer, Browser, and Loop Deck widths and the mixer-band height drag at their seams and persist; the device dock snaps shown/hidden at its seam; the header column is fixed. Window size, position, and panel sizes are remembered across launches (panel show/hide states deliberately reset each launch).

The view toggles

Two rows of glyph buttons above the header column:

• Workspace row: Mixer · Launcher (Loop Deck) · Browser · Chat (Engineer) · Dock.
• Arrange-tools row: Automation Mode (A) · Automation Arm (record rides) · Draw Mode (B) · Follow · Tempo lane · ? (Tooltips) · Re-Enable Automation (appears only while something is overridden — the row closes up rather than leaving its slot empty). The ? turns the hover explanations on and off — the same switch as Preferences ▸ Appearance ▸ Help, lit while they are on.

A toggle that is on is lit in the accent; one that is off is plain, and pointing at an off toggle brightens it a little without ever out-shining a lit one — the brightness carries on versus off, so hover cannot be allowed to invert it. Holding one down now reads as held.

The Command Palette

⌘/ (or View ▸ Search Commands…) opens the palette: type to fuzzy-match any of the 322 commands by name, key, or category; ↑/↓ and Return to run one. Rows show each command's live shortcut — the fastest way to reach anything not on a toolbar, and the best way to discover what Zammoth can do. (The palette is also bound to ⇧⌘/ — ⌘? — but macOS usually keeps that chord for its Help-menu search, so ⌘/ is the one that always works.)

The row under the pointer lights, and only rows that can actually run do: a command that is unavailable right now takes neither the hover nor the ↑/↓ highlight, so the keyboard never lands somewhere that will refuse you. While the palette is open the surfaces behind it stop responding, and clicking outside closes it.

The menus

• File — New/Open/Import DAWproject…/Open Recent (the last 8; unplugged locations show "(offline)" and revive when remounted) · Save · Export… · Sign In · Check for Updates… · Preferences.
• View — Search Commands… · Keyboard Shortcuts… · interface Zoom In/Out/Actual Size · Skin ▸ (Jade · Lime · Cobalt · Crimson · Violet · Copper · Steel) · Meters ▸ (Phosphor Ladder · Solid Gradient · Chunky Blocks · Dot Matrix · Scanline Screen · Mono Ink).
• Help — Report a Problem… (copyable diagnostics — never project content) · Show Logs in Finder · Zammoth on the Web · Third-Party Notices.

Everything else lives in context menus (right-click a track, clip, section, device, pad, browser row…) and shortcuts — the palette lists it all.

Menus open where you asked for them: a right-click menu's corner lands on the pointer and opens down and to the right (flipping only when the screen runs out), and a menu opened from a button hangs off that button. Long menus are one scrolling column with a slim scroll rail on the right — never a sheet that spreads sideways across the screen — and lists that have a natural shape are grouped: device menus are sectioned by family (DYNAMICS, EQ & TONE, COLOUR, MODULATION, SPACE, STEREO, UTILITY) in the same order the browser's Devices palette uses, and the groove pool collapses into one submenu per family.

Look and feel

The hardware-console skin is always dark; the seven accent skins switch live (View ▸ Skin or Preferences ▸ Appearance) and theme the phosphor, the LCD wells, and the arrangement field. Steel is the neutral no-hue option. Amber is reserved for the agent everywhere; the loop/markers use the fixed blue-cyan; the playhead stays amber. Meter styles apply app-wide (View ▸ Meters). Interface size scales the whole UI (70–200 %, ⌘= / ⌘− / ⌘⌥0).

Dialogs are "ink cards" — dark rounded cards where severity lives in the title colour and the Return-key default is the one filled button. Renames never open dialogs; the name itself simply becomes editable where it sits, at the size it was already drawn — Enter or a click elsewhere commits, Esc cancels. Tooltips are live throughout.

How controls answer you. Four rules hold everywhere: anything you can press lights under the pointer and takes a pointing cursor; anything you cannot press right now is drawn flat and unlit and stops answering the pointer altogether, rather than lighting up and then refusing the click; a control that is already engaged still brightens on hover (lit and hovered is brighter than lit); and where two things dim the same control — a track switched off inside a group you are not focused on, say — the dims multiply instead of one replacing the other. The cursor is a promise: where it offers a fade handle or a trim edge, that is what the press gets.

Two more. Clicking the chrome never takes the keyboard away from what you were editing — press Play, a track's output routing, PRE/POST or Keep Latency and the arrangement or the piano roll keeps the keys, so the arrows, Delete, ⌘D and ⌘A still go where you were working instead of going dead until you click back in. And a switched-off device stays readable: bypassing one dims it, but only once, so its numbers are still legible while you tune it before switching it back on.

The app icon is the jade mammoth; the Dock tile follows your macOS light/dark setting.