- 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36798774
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
- 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.
by pimlottc
10 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by shevy-java
1 subcomments
- 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.
by jauntywundrkind
5 subcomments
- 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?
Recommending Friendly Orange Glow (Doer, 2018), btw. Fun read. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545610/the-friendly...
- There is a thing that cool-retro-term is lacking: Letters showing up on the screen the instant you press the keyboard button.
by NunoSempere
0 subcomment
- I have a regular reminder to use this every now and then because it lifts my mood consistenly :)
- It 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/stea...
- 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.
by bmurphy1976
1 subcomments
- 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.
- See 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>2. <https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/>
by gorgoiler
1 subcomments
- I believe hyprland has a shader that will do CRT emulation for the entire drawing surface:
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.
by archargelod
0 subcomment
- Looks 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
[1] https://lensdump.com/i/f6qna1
by technothrasher
2 subcomments
- 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???"
by VikingCoder
0 subcomment
- My co-worker Mike and I had our monitors set up back-to-back. When he wanted my attention, he'd degauss his monitor.
- 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.
- My "greyed-out" link tells me this was posted not long ago.
- Is 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?
- 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.
- 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%.
- The 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.
- My first machine had a monochrome 720x348 amber display, and the amber mode on this really takes me back.
- brew:
cool-retro-term has been deprecated because it does not pass the macOS Gatekeeper check! It will be disabled on 2026-09-01.
- Would be nice if this could be a plug-in for GhostTTY
by rufus_foreman
0 subcomment
- I forgot I had this installed, thanks for the reminder!
by korrectional
0 subcomment
- I wonder if this could run proprely on WSL
- if this got sixel support it would be just perfect! I would use it for everything
by Steve-Tony
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by Brian-Watkins
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- [dead]
Hacker News