Cool Retro Terminal | Hacker News Reader

Cool Retro Terminal

diego-pacheco.blogspot.com

107 pointsdiegopacheco33 comments

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The project’s Github page is a better link: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

It’s available for Mac even though the blog post doesn’t mention it.

Trevor Blackwell wrote a cool "Apple2" hack for Xscreensaver that doubles as a usable terminal.

https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/

FYI, there's an anti HN referral script happening that redirects to a rude image on imgur.

I fell for that.

Is this the JWZ of "no you have two problems" regex quote? What does he have against HN?

The very same. Also the JWZ of "Unix port of Netscape" fame, and the XEmacs/LucidEmacs fork of GNU Emacs.

He's... not a fan of Y Combinator: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/02/noted-fascist-collaborator-...

(and again, you'll need to copy/paste that link rather than clicking on it)

last I checked it was smaller than 80x24 so although it was 'retro' looking, it wasn't really very compatible with much if you go into full-screen mode (e.g. vi, top, etc)

There's a similar terminal for macOS and iOS called cathode. iOS version even uses accelerometer to mimic screen wavering when moved.

The mac version was using a lot of CPU cycles, so I stopped using it, but it's worth checking.

I use 'tritty' (for slow terminal line) in combination with the directly-extracted font from the vt220 (for looks) for much the same effect in a more portable way. It doesn't emulate the CRT artifacts, but it's generally pretty good to emulate a 'real terminal' feeling.

https://github.com/sjmulder/trickle

http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/

The tritty timing was a bit off on OpenBSD last I tried (IIRC something about the sleep granularity being to large and so the emulation always going too slow), but on Linux & MacOS it works great.

I just use a separate terminal config/start script and fire it up in 80x24 for small-scale admin-type tasks or when I feel like low level focus, and a regular setup for everything else..

The green and orange terminal screen colors will fit perfectly with the themed colors of this keyset, intended for users of Cherry-compatible mechanical keyboards: https://www.massdrop.com/buy/massdrop-x-admgc-sa-green-scree...

"Uncle Bob" Martin also used it in his videos ((https://cleancoders.com/). While watching the video, I recognized the Cool Retro on some of his segments where he was showing lines of code. By the way, his videos are really quirky with lots of scenes, and highly recommended, despite not being free.

Sometimes, I get an urge to buy used VT terminals on Ebay, but then stop myself from making such mistakes by watching htop running on Retro Cool, and appease my nostalgia.

It works on Linux, but some bugs aren't fixed for a long time and the project looks stalled. They also should have renamed the binary to crt.

ln -s, or alias it

That's what I do :)

This (1) gif from the github page brings out all the school days of "hacking" nostalgia

1: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/121322/32070717-16...

I love it. I always have my Mac terminal set to Homebrew to make me feel and look like a cool hacker - and to match my Matrix screensaver, of course.

I was thinking of switching to primary Linux desktop soon, so I'll be sure to install this.

According to another poster they have a Mac version available on their GitHub page. I checked and they do.

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

Tried it for what it's worth some time ago. Pretty novel and cool looking. Ended up removing it again; I found it too novel even after fiddling with settings.

I would love for it to be able to use arbitrary fonts :) At present, it only works with fonts it was compiled with.

(2017)

My new favourite thing.

is there a similar CSS/JS framework for the web?

I was thinking the exact same thing as I have been porting some old terminal based games to the browser and having a decent looking terminal interface would really help with the immersion.

I agree, it is cool. Real-looking, too.

Nice, but a complete rip-off of the look and feel of the Cathode app, who did it first, a decade or more before.

Cool Retro Term began in November 2013, Cathode in January 2011. That's rather a short "decade or more".

And I think that you'll find that TeleVideo et al. actually did it first, three (proper) decades before either of those. (-:

>That's rather a short "decade or more".

I meant they did it a decade or so before NOW -- not a decade or so before this project, which I knew started in reaction to Cathode, but didn't know when exactly.

Your grammar is misleading then.

> a decade or more before

should probably read

> a decade or more ago

Yeah, I'm notorious for hastily typing my HN comments and making tons of grammar mistakes and typos...

2011 to 2018 is also rather a short "decade or more".

Everything is a ripoff of something else.

yes, no-one would ever come up with an idea of wanting a vintage-feeling terminal on their own, so it must be a copycat.

yes, anybody who says it's a copycat obviously bases it solely on the idea of creating "a vintage-feeling terminal", and not to specific implementation details that were copied verbatim.

See, I can do sarcasm too

Yet not everybody uses mac os so i guess there is nothing wrong with writing a portable gpl clone of a proprietary mac os program.

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