There is a thing that cool-retro-term is lacking: Letters showing up on the screen the instant you press the keyboard button.
Depends on your definition of instant. The lag has seemed normal in CRT for me, and I've been using it for years.
Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs
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Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs
#1022023: 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
Cool. I hadn't seen it or knew about it until this 2025 post.
Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 :-)
You hardcore vim folks are a different breed :-)
> You hardcore vim folks are a different breed :-)
Nah, we're just lazy :-)
Need a shell? Why leave vim? Need to connect to and issue SQL queries to diagnose a database? Why leave Vim?
The actual hardcore folk are those Emacs weenies.
Need a shell? Use Emacs.
Read email? Use Emacs.
Manage my calendar? Emacs.
Note taking? Static website builder? Browse websites? Git client?
Emacs, Emacs, Emacs and (you guessed it) Emacs.
Spreadsheet, File manager, Remote editing, Calculator, Dictionary/Thesaurus ... all Emacs.
Those guys seriously need a therapist ... of course, Emacs has that too (Good 'ol M-x doctor)
Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs
#104My "greyed-out" link tells me this was posted not long ago.
Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs
#105I 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…
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. :/
Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
You hardcore vim folks are a different breed :-)
> You hardcore vim folks are a different breed :-) Nah, we're just lazy :-) Need a shell? Why leave vim? Need to connect to and issue SQL queries to diagnose a database? Why leave Vim? The actual hardcore folk are those Emacs weenies. Need a shell? Use Emacs. Read email? Use Emacs. Manage my calendar? Emacs. Note taking? Static website builder? Browse websites? Git client? Emacs, Emacs, Emacs and (you guessed it) Ema…
Emacs even has its own Vim emulator to solve Emacs lack of an editor!
Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs
#107I 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
Now all we need is to add that to Wayland.
Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The trick is wasting the least amount of time making your task interesting.
Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs
#109People 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.
Presumably the examples have the effect ramped up so it can easily be seen even on smaller screens.
Re: Cool-retro-term: terminal emulator which mimics look and feel of CRTs
#110People 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 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…
> 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.