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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The 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.
My 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.
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...
It 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.
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 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.
sounds 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
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]
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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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???"
Whoa, this sent me back. I cut my teeth on Red Hat Linux 5.2 (pre-RHEL), and I remember when they first added Bluecurve… oh jeez, this means im old, doesn’t it?
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.
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.
It 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).
I'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
Yes, correct! If you check out 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).
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%.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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
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 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.
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!
If only the “just snow” one would have had the snow floating down (instead of, inexplicably, up)!
oh that water one is cute. makes me think of old gnome effects? I wonder how distracting it is in practice
Bit disappointed that Galaxy is the only one without a preview, what does it look like?
lol I'm smart apparently. It's not the "galaxy" shader, it's the "starfield" shader! I should double check before commenting I guess.
https://github.com/0xhckr/ghostty-shaders/blob/main/starfiel...
I'm not sure what "galaxy" looks like but it might not have worked or shown nothing.
an image is available in the PR where it was added: https://github.com/0xhckr/ghostty-shaders/pull/30
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
... and the crackles and pops of a vinyl record?
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.
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.
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.
Damn, now I do not have fun with it anymore.
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
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.
The 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.
My 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.
> 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.
Don’t underestimate how many of us were raised in hand-me-down computers.
Those 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://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.
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...
It 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.
this is like looking at a monitor that spent 6 years as a security desk monitor before you got it
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 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.
In real life, monochrome monitors were sharper than color CRTs.
When the task is boring, making your terminal look cool helps.
sounds 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
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
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.
Have any videos or pictures you can share?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enwDjM7pNNE
There is a thing that cool-retro-term is lacking: Letters showing up on the screen the instant you press the keyboard button.
As a user of a dec vt220 on a college vax vms, I can assure you, that did not happen on all old hardware.
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.
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.)
I have a regular reminder to use this every now and then because it lifts my mood consistenly :)
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 believe compositors like picom can already do this.
ctrl+f shader
https://man.archlinux.org/man/picom.1.en
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.
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.
I wonder if this could run proprely on WSL
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.
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???"
do you have a link to download it? or a package name?
https://github.com/NanoBillion/gallant
thanks. just found that too, linked from here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/307356/what-is-the-...
It should get a modern version. IIRC, Luxi Mono was close.
which is a historic X11 font:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxi_fonts
interesting
Whoa, this sent me back. I cut my teeth on Red Hat Linux 5.2 (pre-RHEL), and I remember when they first added Bluecurve… oh jeez, this means im old, doesn’t it?
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.
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 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).
I'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
Yes, correct! If you check out 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).
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%.
It works consistently around 5-6% cpu for me. (I have gpu drivers installed) Also, it is my go-to terminal for claude.
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...
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.
In some cases the color was just a filter in front of a white phosphor screen.
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.
Amber was fairly common to see in US public libraries.
brew:
cool-retro-term has been deprecated because it does not pass the macOS Gatekeeper check! It will be disabled on 2026-09-01.