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Comment by mysterydip | Hacker News Reader

I get the nostalgia appeal, it would be neat for a few minutes, but it doesn't seem like something you could use as your daily driver terminal. If someone has, what's your experience with it?

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At the time (up through 1993), that was what we had. In open labs, there would be some jockeying for the better (newer, almost always) terminals -- a VT420 with white phosphor being the pinnacle of experiences, anything in amber usually being ranked lower than the same in green, except for one Wyse series I had mostly forgotten, where the green was eye-searingly bad with the brightness up, and muddy/blurry with the brightness down.

And then we had Linux on PCs and that was so much better nobody wanted to use the terminals again if they could avoid them.

Turn off some of the effects like the moving scan line or noise and it's fine in my experience.

Sometimes I like to have a process like htop running and easily find the window on my desktop by making it look different than other terminals--this works great for a use case like that, it's unmistakeable what terminal is running the process you want to monitor.

I remember trying this on macOS a while ago and I'm sure it had some odd quirks where things didn't work as expected which put me off using it, I'll have to try it again. There used to be a native macOS app called Cathode which was similar but it's been abandoned

I surely used actual terminals for amber and green ones, connected to the DG/UX server in one of the student labs.

Not only was something that we could use, it was quite often the only option, as the IBM X Windows thin terminals were quite often busy with people playing either dungeon like games or talk sessions, splited across 4 xterms.

That is why I don't get the CLI revivalism culture, I lived through the days it was the only option.

> That is why I don't get the CLI revivalism culture, I lived through the days it was the only option.

You mean you prefer GUIs as natural evolution of CLIs?

GUIs and REPL environments, like on Xerox PARC world.

I tried to use it daily but it just takes too much real state. I often have many terminals opened and got used to them not having borders.

That's exactly the experience I had with a similar app a few years ago. It was fun for the throwback, but most of my terminal use is meant to be productive (which isn't mutually exclusive from fun), and the neat features this had become more of a distraction.

I used it a few years back but I found it crashed far too often (I use tmux so session wasn't lost but still annoying). The visual effects can also be distracting after novelty wears off and performance-wise it doesn't match something like kitty

Crashing is a feature, not a bug.

It crashes deliberately on exit. Because in the era it's simulating, that happened a lot with terminal programs.

Not necessarily terminals, but certainly terminal programs.

I don't run it as a daily driver but sometimes I'll fire it up on my MBP or Chromebook for a few hours of work. I dial back a lot of the effects somewhat. I like the low-fi focus I get from using it it.

I think it's a bit overdone for a solid first impression but maybe a bit too much in the long run? Maybe if it could be toned down a bit for just a slight glow and amber warmth, haha.

I use it as my daily driver. I turn a lot of the effects down (I think the defaults are extreme) and it just looks like an old terminal emulator on a CRT used to. Feels nice.

I found the input latency unbearable.

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