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Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs
- NoSalt 10mo agoMy "greyed-out" link tells me this was posted not long ago.
- pimlottc 10mo agoPeople 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.
- Aldipower 10mo agoDamn, now I do not have fun with it anymore.
- dylan604 10mo agodepends 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.
- weinzierl 10mo agoThe single most annoying thing with these old displays was the flicker. Whenever I use one of my real old home computer era monitors it is the only thing that makes it unbearable after a while. But I'm not surprised they don't go overboard with that in the emulators. They'd probably have to add PSE warnings if they did.
- bitwize 10mo agoMy sister tried to go through broadcast school, with great difficulty especially when she got through the video editing classes. Turns out she has photosensitive epilepsy and all the exposure to CRT monitors made her quite ill. You couldn't convince her to go back to the CRT days for all the tea in China.
- sidewndr46 10mo agoif 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.
- Sharlin 10mo agoCRTs still run circles around basic cheapo TN panels when it comes to color fidelity, dynamic range, viewing angles, and refresh rate. Upper-mid-to-high-end LCD screens have gotten vastly better, but the baseline is still pretty low.
- poke646 10mo agoIt'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...
- rbanffy 10mo agoIt could happen in home computers connected through the antenna input. I think if power was slightly off the desired frequency this could also happen, but we’d need to test.
- ack_complete 10mo agoIt also happens with digital cameras for similar reasons, due to CCD scanning. But yeah, that doesn't happen looking directly at a CRT. The bloom is also too blobby, because it's a gaussian blur. I ran into the same issue trying to implement a similar effect. The bloom shape needs to sharper to look realistic -- which also means unfortunately a non-separable blur.
- derefr 10mo agoA horizontal-line artifact (not the one depicted in the shader) could totally happen, if you were over-driving a monitor with a higher pixel clock than it was happy with. With this kind of artifact, the two halves of the image would also be slightly horizontally misaligned with respect to one-another, too.
- alnwlsn 10mo agoMost 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 http://www.trs-80.org/soft-view-crt.html
- nacozarina 10mo agothis is like looking at a monitor that spent 6 years as a security desk monitor before you got it
- cvcbir 10mo ago> 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.
- crims0n 10mo agoDon’t underestimate how many of us were raised in hand-me-down computers.
- defrost 10mo agoThose of us born in the 60s also recall many variations of CRT terminals. I had a lot of fun with Tektronix 4010 series storage-tube CRT terminals. In real life they had crisp lines and rarely any perceivable flicker (depended how far you pushed the ray trace line length) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SbCIP1m6hs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SbCIP1m6hs You could drive them (in my experience at least) with a PDP-11, an Apple ][, a BBC micro, or a transputer breadboard.
- Aeolun 10mo agoLolwut. I had a CRT TV until well into university, and that was around 2009. CRT’s aren’t that old yet. They just disappeared almost overnight.
- spankibalt 10mo ago> "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.
- saltcured 10mo ago> romantically distorted past Amusing that it can lead to a romantically distorted future for those terminal users. As someone who came up in that era, I would never want to regain those barrel distortions or incoherent pixels I saw in some of the heavy-handed retro terminals. I paid good money for flatter CRTs and also jumped to LCD with a digital input (DVI) as soon as it was a general option I could justify on a work computer order. I'm also happy not to be hearing the constant whine of CRT coils, HDD drive motors, or even so many cooling fans these days.
- derefr 10mo agoMost 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.
- gblargg 10mo agoPresumably the examples have the effect ramped up so it can easily be seen even on smaller screens.
- ctenb 10mo ago2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36798774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36798774 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30734137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30734137 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17413911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17413911 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9093545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9093545 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8399461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8399461
- LeFantome 10mo agoSad 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!
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- jama211 10mo agoI’m so glad this was reposted as I haven’t seen it before and I love it!
- goody71 10mo agoCool. I hadn't seen it or knew about it until this 2025 post.
- graiz 10mo agoCool project, love the visuals. Wish it would merge as a plugin or something to a project like http://ghostty.org/ http://ghostty.org/ while I appreciate the visual fun, there are other pragmatic tools beyond visuals that are handy.
- Diti 10mo agoGhostty already supports shaders and effects like this.
- aduitsis 10mo agoIt can only apply shader(s) to the current frame I think. To produce the crt ghosting you'd probably need access to the previous frame (not an expert).
- throitallaway 10mo agoI've tried the shaders in the following repo with ghostty. They definitely work. I ended up keeping a cursor trail shader. https://github.com/0xhckr/ghostty-shaders https://github.com/0xhckr/ghostty-shaders
- aduitsis 10mo agoYes, correct! If you check out https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference, the iPreviousCursor is available, so it can be used against the iCurrentCursor to produce a fading effect. But I think the entire previous framebuffer isn't there (yet).
- rbanffy 10mo agoI 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.
- rootbear 10mo agoIt'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.
- dylan604 10mo agoJust 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.
- Shadow_Death 10mo agoI 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.
- layer8 10mo agoIn real life, monochrome monitors were sharper than color CRTs.
- rbanffy 10mo agoWhen the task is boring, making your terminal look cool helps.
- dylan604 10mo agosounds like one might have the wrong job then to me. if your task is boring, update the desktop's background. if your task is boring, spend hours upon hours choosing which font is better for your IDE/terminal. if your task is boring, you'll find anything to put off doing the task
- rbanffy 10mo agoThe trick is wasting the least amount of time making your task interesting.
- wanderingstan 10mo agoI 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.
- Steve-Tony 10mo ago[dead]
- jauntywundrkind 10mo agoSide 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? Recommending Friendly Orange Glow (Doer, 2018), btw. Fun read. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545610/the-friendly-orange-glow-by-brian-dear/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545610/the-friendly...
- Cyan488 10mo agoThe 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.
- dboreham 10mo agoIn some cases the color was just a filter in front of a white phosphor screen.
- Cockbrand 10mo agoIIRC, amber was considered the most eye friendly color back then. The cheaper monochrome screens were green-on-black.
- csixty4 10mo agoThe brain perceives amber as a "bright" color that contrasts well with black, without the headaches that come from staring at white light for hours.
- dboreham 10mo agoAmber was fairly unusual. More common to see white or green.
- acuozzo 10mo agoAmber was fairly common to see in US public libraries.
- com2kid 10mo agoI 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.
- Aldipower 10mo agoHaving the same with audio. I actually like tape hiss. :-O
- SoftTalker 10mo ago... and the crackles and pops of a vinyl record?
- l1ng0 10mo agoI miss the old phonecall background hiss, now it's impossible to tell the difference between someone being silent in a call and a disconnected 'line'.
- catskull 10mo agoI have ghostty set up with this “starfield” shader: https://github.com/0xhckr/ghostty-shaders/blob/main/starfield.glsl 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 https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html Edit: I use the "starfield" shader, not the "galaxy" shader. Doh!
- nemomarx 10mo agooh that water one is cute. makes me think of old gnome effects? I wonder how distracting it is in practice
- Brian-Watkins 10mo ago[dead]
- technothrasher 10mo agoNot 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???"
- em-bee 10mo agodo you have a link to download it? or a package name?
- rbanffy 10mo agoIt should get a modern version. IIRC, Luxi Mono was close.
- em-bee 10mo agowhich is a historic X11 font: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxi_fonts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxi_fonts interesting
- technothrasher 10mo agohttps://github.com/NanoBillion/gallant https://github.com/NanoBillion/gallant
- 10mo ago
- NunoSempere 10mo agoI have a regular reminder to use this every now and then because it lifts my mood consistenly :)
- shevy-java 10mo agoI'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.
- naikrovek 10mo agoPlan9 “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.)
- teddyh 10mo agoSee also the MGR Window System: <https://hack.org/~mc/mgr/ https://hack.org/~mc/mgr/>
- rbanffy 10mo agoI 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.
- krautburglar 10mo agoI believe compositors like picom can already do this. ctrl+f shader https://man.archlinux.org/man/picom.1.en https://man.archlinux.org/man/picom.1.en
- rbanffy 10mo agoNow all we need is to add that to Wayland.
- krautburglar 10mo agoBoth X11 and Wayland need a coherent accessibility on-ramp first. I know AI can remedy many of the issues after-the-fact, but it is an embarrassment that we need to go that far when the text and the partitioning are already known at different layers of the stack.
- rufus_foreman 10mo agoI forgot I had this installed, thanks for the reminder!
- ok123456 10mo agoNeat 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%.
- nurettin 10mo agoIt works consistently around 5-6% cpu for me. (I have gpu drivers installed) Also, it is my go-to terminal for claude.
- gorgoiler 10mo agoI believe hyprland has a shader that will do CRT emulation for the entire drawing surface: https://github.com/DemonKingSwarn/retro-hyprland 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.
- zozbot234 10mo agoIt 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.
- hdjfjdkdn 10mo ago[dead]
- fnord77 10mo agobrew: cool-retro-term has been deprecated because it does not pass the macOS Gatekeeper check! It will be disabled on 2026-09-01.
- blueflow 10mo agoThere is a thing that cool-retro-term is lacking: Letters showing up on the screen the instant you press the keyboard button.
- bmurphy1976 10mo agoI 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.
- tomcam 10mo agoSuper 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.
- archargelod 10mo agoLooks nice and pretty light on resources. 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 https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+007C [1] https://lensdump.com/i/f6qna1 https://lensdump.com/i/f6qna1
- korrectional 10mo agoI wonder if this could run proprely on WSL
- kazinator 10mo agoThe phosphor fading in the demo images is unrealistically slow. It actually resembles early LCDs more than CRTs! Undoubtedly, that must be a parameter you can tweak.
- enriquto 10mo agoif this got sixel support it would be just perfect! I would use it for everything
- teddyh 10mo agoSee also “Phosphor”¹, a screen saver, part of XScreenSaver², but also usable as a terminal: /usr/libexec/xscreensaver/phosphor -scale 2 -delay 0 -program $SHELL 1. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZWTrl7pV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZWTrl7pV0> 2. <https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/ https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/>
- arionmiles 10mo agoWow the owner of the XScreenSaver really hates HN lol...
- stared 10mo agoIt reminds me of Jupiter Hell roguelike (with a tagline "like chess, but played with a shotgun"). It's screen: https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/811320/ss_de10383e961d59896f3a66ae05d3f6dea96f6449.116x65.jpg?t=1755537210 https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/stea...
- iammattmurphy 10mo agolol that’s the smallest image I’ve ever seen Looks like a cool game though, I enjoy a roguelike
- stared 10mo agoMy bad, I accidentally posted thumbnail. I meant: https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/811320/ss_de10383e961d59896f3a66ae05d3f6dea96f6449.1920x1080.jpg?t=1755537210 https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/stea...
- VikingCoder 10mo agoMy co-worker Mike and I had our monitors set up back-to-back. When he wanted my attention, he'd degauss his monitor.
- Pet_Ant 10mo agoWould be nice if this could be a plug-in for GhostTTY
- aidenn0 10mo agoMy first machine had a monochrome 720x348 amber display, and the amber mode on this really takes me back.
- code-e 10mo agoIs there some general purpose (linux) software that could apply these kind of post-processing effects to my any terminal? Or failing that, my whole screen?