People go so overboard on this stuff, the amount of ghosting on the DOS example is insane. I don’t want to spoils anyone’s fun but that’s not really what most screens looked like back then.
> "I don’t want to spoils anyone’s fun but that’s not really what most screens looked like back then."
I don't really see the problem with what's written on the tin here; it's called retro-term and not vintage- or classic-term, after all (I didn't read the project's webpage). In other words: It's correctly advertised as something new that's just fashioned on something from yesteryear. So you can really go overboard with technically inaccurate, kitschy glitchshit that's so popular with crowd. Of course, historically challenged people will fall into the trappings of a romantically distorted past they never were a part of. As they always did and always will. But that's just life.
Most screens, no. But that one half-dead trash-picked screen that stands out in your memory as emblematic of that time in your life when you were building computers with your own two hands? Certainly.
Cool project, love the visuals. Wish it would merge as a plugin or something to a project like http://ghostty.org/ while I appreciate the visual fun, there are other pragmatic tools beyond visuals that are handy.
It's fun to play around with, but unless I'm missing something, it's not possible to specify the size, in rows and columns, of the screen, such as 24x80. It's an odd omission.
Just like back in the day, this would cause me to tire so much faster than I normally do. These things are "cute", but for actually getting shit done, they are an annoyance. Does anyone use something like this for extended periods of time? The clarity of modern terminals is a godsend.
I used this extensively in a past job where I had to have have a ton of terminals open and monitor/use them all, with each one serving a different role. (We were prototyping some really complicated experiences) I used this tool to give each terminal a distinctive “look”, with some coding for effects. E.G. all green screens were backends, different fonts for the different OSs, etc. It looked wild while in use, but really did help.
Side question, was there a reason early CRT screens were amber? Or was this perhaps maybe downstream of PLATO & the first plasma (and touch) screens being a Friendly Orange Glow?
I used to daily drive this, most of the effects were minimized but I found that a little bit of white noise really helped make my terminal a lot easier on the eyes to read. I wonder if it is related to how some people find that film grain has a pleasing effect.
For those looking at the screenshots note that the terminal is incredibly customizable, you don't have to have all the effects dialed up to 11!
Sadly bit rot has set in and the project doesn't work that well now days. Also a lack of tab support really hurts it as a daily driving terminal.
I love it because I have glare/doubling around words. Adding some visual noise can mask my own eye problems, and adding some visual effects with the glowbar and jittering if I feel like it, can really make it easier to focus for some reason.
> Also a lack of tab support really hurts it as a daily driving terminal.
For some, perhaps.
I've not needed tabbed terminals ever since vim got proper terminal support. I run shells within vim, so have them in splits, tabs, etc in a plain xterm.
Sorta like a tmux replacement, but with better editor support :-)
It'd be awesome to run something like this headless, maybe with a frame buffer. I setup my home lab with Freebsd recently and it's just sitting there without a cool CRT screen. :/
Not quite this extreme, but I usually use the old Sun console font in my terminal windows, because I'm an old fart and it makes me happy. Someone at work just the other day looked at my screen and said, "What the heck is wrong with your terminal window???"
I'd kind of want a terminal that can be used for everything, including browsing, image display, playing videos and so forth. KDE konsole is good but I don't see any logical reason why I need to simulate 1980s terminals in 2025. Right now I use KDE konsole to either display something on the terminal or start some other program (such as gimp etc...) but I'd like the interface to actually be the terminal in itself, as-is.
I contribute to this project (they use my 3278 font) but I think the best way to do this would be to have shaders available to compositor windows. This way, any terminal app (or video player) could tap into a library of CRT shaders.
The only thing missing would be frame-to-frame data availability to make persistence possible - Windows Terminal has shaders, but they can’t access the previous frame.
Neat to use for a few minutes as a novelty/toy. Not something I'd do daily, though. I remember trying it out years ago, and it would peg the CPU at 100%.
I haven’t used it and have no idea if it works. Now that my eyes are shot I don’t mind losing fidelity for a bit of atmospherics when doing some casual computing (eg checking email with Pine like it’s 1999.)
If I weren’t so lovingly tied to niri I would like to give this shader a go. Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.
I like the idea and used it for a couple years, but the lack of functionality was a bummer.
Ghostty with shaders on the other hand gives me all the functionality AND the effects. Some people may not have figured this out yet but you can stack multiple shaders on top of each to get some really cool combination effects.
Super fun but so much not for me. Fricking awesome if you're in the TV or movie business trying to get that effect right. Reminds me of the first time my artist kid used the term "pixel art", which in my memory brings back only frustration from my 1980s restriction to 2, 4, then 16 colors. I love unlimited colors, thank you very much. And I remember being grateful to pay $1,000 for a flat screen monitor around 1995 or so. I adore the crispness of digital output.
Again, not criticizing this effort. Just saying that I love being here in the 21st, thank you very much.
But it seems buggy at rendering some unicode characters, I use vertical line[0] for my indentation guides in Neovim, and they look outright hideous in cool-retro-term[1]
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 48.5 ms ] threadAgreed. It’s sad but I think that unless you were born in the 70s, you may not be old enough to have seen enough CRT terminals to know the difference.
We need at least one CRT terminal in each city so that kids have a chance to experience a real one.
I don't really see the problem with what's written on the tin here; it's called retro-term and not vintage- or classic-term, after all (I didn't read the project's webpage). In other words: It's correctly advertised as something new that's just fashioned on something from yesteryear. So you can really go overboard with technically inaccurate, kitschy glitchshit that's so popular with crowd. Of course, historically challenged people will fall into the trappings of a romantically distorted past they never were a part of. As they always did and always will. But that's just life.
2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30734137
2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17413911
2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9093545
2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8399461
Recommending Friendly Orange Glow (Doer, 2018), btw. Fun read. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545610/the-friendly...
For those looking at the screenshots note that the terminal is incredibly customizable, you don't have to have all the effects dialed up to 11!
Sadly bit rot has set in and the project doesn't work that well now days. Also a lack of tab support really hurts it as a daily driving terminal.
For some, perhaps.
I've not needed tabbed terminals ever since vim got proper terminal support. I run shells within vim, so have them in splits, tabs, etc in a plain xterm.
Sorta like a tmux replacement, but with better editor support :-)
The only thing missing would be frame-to-frame data availability to make persistence possible - Windows Terminal has shaders, but they can’t access the previous frame.
https://github.com/DemonKingSwarn/retro-hyprland
I haven’t used it and have no idea if it works. Now that my eyes are shot I don’t mind losing fidelity for a bit of atmospherics when doing some casual computing (eg checking email with Pine like it’s 1999.)
If I weren’t so lovingly tied to niri I would like to give this shader a go. Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.
cool-retro-term has been deprecated because it does not pass the macOS Gatekeeper check! It will be disabled on 2026-09-01.
Ghostty with shaders on the other hand gives me all the functionality AND the effects. Some people may not have figured this out yet but you can stack multiple shaders on top of each to get some really cool combination effects.
Again, not criticizing this effort. Just saying that I love being here in the 21st, thank you very much.
But it seems buggy at rendering some unicode characters, I use vertical line[0] for my indentation guides in Neovim, and they look outright hideous in cool-retro-term[1]
[0] https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+007C
[1] https://lensdump.com/i/f6qna1
It actually resembles early LCDs more than CRTs!
Undoubtedly, that must be a parameter you can tweak.