Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of the old CRTs

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.

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 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.

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 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.

I have a regular reminder to use this every now and then because it lifts my mood consistenly :)

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'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.

Hacker anylaser de passe oublié et que je suis encore

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???"

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.

I forgot I had this installed, thanks for the reminder!

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...

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