Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs (opens in new tab)

Sad that we missed 2024 esepcially since the 2023 guy explicitly asked for it. Second comment predicted 2026 for a next post--missed it by a month!

I’m so glad this was reposted as I haven’t seen it before and I love it!

Cool. I hadn't seen it or knew about it until this 2025 post.

I have ghostty set up with this “starfield” shader: https://github.com/0xhckr/ghostty-shaders/blob/main/starfiel...

I also have it set up to do adaptive theme, so in light mode the galaxy is mostly just a little noise on the black text but in dark mode it’s like I’m piloting a space ship. Highly recommend.

I also documented a few other shaders on my blog here: https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html

Edit: I use the "starfield" shader, not the "galaxy" shader. Doh!

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.

Having the same with audio. I actually like tape hiss. :-O

> 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 :-)

Fun fact, you can use Ghostty and vibecode the shader you want. In fact, the other day I used Claude Code to create me a custom CRT shader.

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. :/

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.

if you're talking about cutting edge CRTs, many of the last generation actually beat flat panels for years. Some may still in some aspects.

There were plenty of junk CRTs out there used for text only display with insane levels of persistence and other issues that lead to a very unique appearance. It's also sort of moot at this point. The existing CRTs out there that have this behavior have degraded over the years. No one makes new high persistence CRTs that I am aware of. So it's mostly down to our memory of them.

I actually have a flat panel that has over 2 decades degraded and now has some weird persistence going on.

Most of them weren't, but some were. If all you were doing was looking at screens of text, a long persistence phosphor could be desirable[0].

I've got one that is inside an Apple II monitor. Can confirm, the image looks very flicker-free, but has pretty bad ghosting if you're looking at anything that scrolls. It looks cool but is pretty rough to do any work on. The other green CRTs I have are barely more persistent than a regular black and white TV, and I've never heard of a long persistence color monitor.

[0] - http://www.trs-80.org/soft-view-crt.html

> "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.

Damn, now I do not have fun with it anymore.

depends on how the brightness/contrast was set on the tube. if someone came in to a screen that was off and did not allow it enough time to warm up, it was common to see people adjust these knobs in the mornings. eventually, the tube would warm up, and things would just be too bright.

> that’s not really what most screens looked like back then

Agreed. 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.

It's almost like a caricature of a CRT. I can see the novelty, but hope that people aren't lead to believe monitors looked like this.

I think what bothers me most is the horizontal line that slowly moves across the screen every few seconds. It's an artifact of recording a CRT on film and doesn't occur when you look at a real monitor...

Presumably the examples have the effect ramped up so it can easily be seen even on smaller screens.

this is like looking at a monitor that spent 6 years as a security desk monitor before you got it

I think it's the blurry text. I installed it once and used it maybe twice. I found that I spent most of my time squinting at the screen like I needed to put my glasses on. I had to quit using it because my face hurt from squinting the whole time.

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.

When the task is boring, making your terminal look cool helps.

Plan9 “terminals” were like that. Create a window, and by default the text shell runs in it. If you have vdir installed, and you run that in the same window, you get a semi-graphical file browser. Exit that and then run games/doom and now doom is running in the same window. Exit that and “cpu” into another machine and run riostart and now that same window that did all the other things now is running a window manager on the remote machine, displayed on your machine. Graphical apps, textual apps, everything. All in Rio windows. Smoothly, too. (It is a very different paradigm so I am not going to profess that it is user friendly or anything, but it does work, and it works well once you get your head around it.)

The color of the screens is related to the phosphor used to coat the back of the screen, which is excited to glow by the electron beam. According to wiki, amber was used as an "eye-friendly" ergonomic color for similar reasons we use blue blocking filters today.

The brain perceives amber as a "bright" color that contrasts well with black, without the headaches that come from staring at white light for hours.

IIRC, amber was considered the most eye friendly color back then. The cheaper monochrome screens were green-on-black.

There was a considerable debate on the ergonomics of terminal colors, where the pseudoscience said green and amber were the best... and white wasn’t very good. I’m not sure what the truth was. Adding a couple of inches to the 12-inch screens of the time would have made a bigger difference in eye fatigue than phosphor color. That said, there was something magical about glowing phosphor...

Amber was fairly unusual. More common to see white or green.

As a user of a dec vt220 on a college vax vms, I can assure you, that did not happen on all old hardware.

Depends on your definition of instant. The lag has seemed normal in CRT for me, and I've been using it for years.

lol that’s the smallest image I’ve ever seen Looks like a cool game though, I enjoy a roguelike

I believe compositors like picom can already do this.

ctrl+f shader

https://man.archlinux.org/man/picom.1.en

Have any videos or pictures you can share?

It doesn't quite seem to have the same effects, though. It would be nice to see cool-retro-term's extreme CRT effects implemented in an all-points-addressable low-res mode. Perhaps it could even be made to run as a Wayland compositor, similar to hyprland.

Wow the owner of the XScreenSaver really hates HN lol...

I set my terminal windows and such to Monaco, because it was the default Apple monospace font from 1984 until 2009.

do you have a link to download it? or a package name?

I think the best thing that could happen would be to be able to add shaders to windows in Wayland.

When MacOS 9 was a thing, I had an extension called “out of context menus” that added options such as “Gaussian blur” the the context menus so you could blur a window.

Ghostty already supports shaders and effects like this.

It works consistently around 5-6% cpu for me. (I have gpu drivers installed) Also, it is my go-to terminal for claude.