Cool Retro Terminal (opens in new tab)

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

Someone in 2024 please continue this list

I always loved over-the-top, somewhat impractical visual effects like this. Reminds me of growing up playing with Compiz Fusion.

For a retro Android game I maintain, I use the term "Gratuitous Eye Straining Effects" in the settings page. It needs to be toggleable, because I can only tolerate it for a short period. My naming was inspired by k9mail's settings called "Gaudy visual effects". May as well have some fun with words when implementing such effects.

Note that older software was designed to be run on a screen like this. E.g. game dev artists took advantage of the technology quirks to make their titles look better. Source: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/167804/did-retro...

I enjoy using using cool-retro-term from time to time. I don't run it for long but I do run it sometimes for the sake of nostalgia. I usually run it in full screen and increase the font size to approximate 80x24/25 terminals for an immersive experience. To balance practicality with nostalgia, I run a tmux session in cool-retro-term. It helps with conveniently switching back and forth between cool-retro-term and a regular terminal without losing the terminal session.

The terminal effects are configurable. I disable the settings named Burin, Glow Line, and RGB Shift to get a crispy and distraction-free experience. The RGB Shift setting is disabled for most built-in profiles anyway but enabled for some profiles like Vintage and IBM Dos. By the way, the Vintage profile is quite amusing. Many settings are cranked way up in this profile! The text is blurry, and the incessant flickering of the screen creates an unsettling impression that the monitor might break down any moment.

A nice little detail I like about cool-retro-term is the reflection of the screen on the glossy frame of the monitor. If we increase the Screen Curvature setting to 50% or more, we can quite clearly see the reflection of the top line or bottom line of the terminal on the frame.[1]

In case you haven't noticed it, the app is named cool-retro-term and it is abbreviated to CRT. The app icon[2] is also "CRT" written using large letters followed by a large cursor. Guess what else is abbreviated to CRT? Yes, "cathode-ray tube" of the cathode-ray tube computer monitors.

[1] https://susam.github.io/blob/img/cool-retro-term/2023-07-20-...

[2] https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/blob/f157648d...

That's how I tried to make my personal website look!

I actually asked GPT3 to write the code for me. I'm not a SWE so I'm not sure how well it did, but it works!

http://h4x.club

It's been a while since I've checked this program out, so this morning I downloaded it and spent some time taming some of the more extreme effects and fooling around with fonts. Pretty happy with the results! I think I got it looking pretty great[0] in GNU Emacs and Org-mode.

Admittedly the Unicode private use area icon sets look a little bit out of place in a retro terminal, so let's just call it futuristic retro terminal :)

[0]: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/crt_emacs.png

Very cool! Windows Terminal will let you use hlsl files to define post-processing shaders so you could achieve this as a plug-in to windows terminal as well!

I like this terminal and have used it frequently, but it should be noted that it is a fantasy representation of how these old displays actually looked. You may be able to tone down a lot of the settings but you still wont be able to achieve that similar of a look to original displays. The monochrome displays of the time had quite clear quality. I have an Apple ii monitor from the early 80s on my desk, and the similarities are more akin to an exaggerated caricature of a celebrity. But maybe my experience doesn't go far back enough

When I made a terminal based game for a gamejam Cool Retro Terminal served as quick and easy way to make the final demonstration look nicer.

Really good, but the blur/bloom seems a bit overdone. I don't remember it being that fuzzy and blurry, in the picture the blur extends half a character around each block, which is a bit excessive.

The effects are great! However, these feel like old-old terminals, as in terminals from 80s after decades of use. Good quality phosphor monitors are a lot crisper than the screenshots.

Not retro for me! I still fondly remember the ADM-3A I used at Purdue in for 3-4 years after 1995. I would buy a working one in a heartbeat but they are kind of expensive now. Kicking myself for not snagging one when they were being thrown away by the truckload.

The recent "Silo" series on AppleTv had some nice retro-terminals. I've been trying to find better pictures or references, so if anyone has any, gladly appreciated.

Only reference I currently found: https://twitter.com/AdamRedwoods/status/1677878315284316161

Cool Retro Term is my daily driver. Though I do turn off the screen curvature (look, terminals were straight on my CRT too, they were windows there) and the burn in (just a little too excessive for me, though I haven't tried turning it most of the way down). Tools that are a joy to use are fun as well as functional.

I love this and I used it for fun occasionally. On my MacBook I also used Cathode before, but after I learned about Cool Retro Term the thought crossed my mind that the former might be a rip-off of the later. I do not wish to make any false accusations but the effects are pretty similar and maybe other commenters can confirm or dispel the suspicion.

What I am looking for since some time now is a way to create these effects in good quality in a compositor. It would be much more convenient that way. Free and open would be cool, but I'd also pay for it. Does anyone know if there is a good plugin that works with Nuke, Natron or Blender?

anyone who likes this will probably also enjoy Blinky - a retro-CRT text editor for osx. https://blinky.en.softonic.com/mac

This is triggering memories of late-night job monitoring and tape swaps!

Is it abandoned? Last commit was Mar 31, 2022 and there are 24 open PRs - most without any discussion happening.

I use this a couple of times a year when I crank up my Pandas version of TOPS-20 (http://panda.trailing-edge.com/). Now that VMS is ported to x86 I may use it more!

Wow, that look brings me back. The library in the city I grew up in had monitors like that well into the 90s.

They implemented a library map on them that allowed you to zoom in to see a depiction of an atom, or out to see a depiction of the universe. Really blew my mind as a kid.

Someone at VoidLinux added this. Curious how many other distros package this.

    xbps-query -Rs retro
    [-] cool-retro-term-1.1.1_1          Good looking terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display
    [snip...]

I get the nostalgia appeal, it would be neat for a few minutes, but it doesn't seem like something you could use as your daily driver terminal. If someone has, what's your experience with it?

Too bad I have an older version of Qt on my system.

Why is software deployment so hard these days, despite all the effort that is poured into package managers?

Is there a css for textarea that anyone has done for this? I could use it on a project I'm working on

Now, if this thing supported sixels, it would be a great tool for giving eye-catching interactive presentations.

Does anyone know how to have a terminal with the classic DOS narrow font?

(or Linux early boot up messages)

Pretty cool! The reflections on the sides are a very nice touch.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

It's really made with love.

feels like playing fallout