Cool-retro-term | Hacker News Reader

Cool-retro-term

github.com

176 pointsthristian47 comments

This is awesome nostalgia, but tell me, for those who have never seen a CRT display, does it have any meaning to you?

Seeing this, I wonder if the world has forgotten what a computer is. Now we've got devices, for example phones, and the computer (and the Internet) is right at the surface of the device. When we used CRT displays, we knew our display was just a repurposed television screen that communicated with a separate and discreet computer, which was another (and different) kind of machine.

Same with modems. When they screeched and howled, the duration of noise and the "seeking" nature of the sounds was a clear indicator that we were connecting to other devices at a distance, devices that were not always available, over connections that were tenuous.

Now everything is immediate and ubiquitous. The computer has been subsumed into the terminal itself. And what was distant is at our fingertips.

Don't worry. Twenty five years from now some AI will code up a HN emulator and make it look like a old-fashioned flat panel monitor floating in a small window in 3D space, instead of taking up the entire visual field like a proper computing device.

Most of the time, my 3G is as immediate and ubiquitous as my modem connection 15 years ago - even in big centers like NY.

Computers are still "mysterious machines" for a lot of people. I still stumble upon startup founders, from time to time, that consider computers "something I try to use" (granted, not tech cofounders).

Yes, things evolved, but I don't think we got to the point where computers are just like light bulbs and connectivity is just like tap water yet... In most places, for most people, at least.

I suspect only people who've never used a CRT would use this sort of thing ;)

I used CRTs for years (naturally... I'm in my late 30s) and, without fail, they sucked. If they weren't long-persistence, they were flickery; if they were, they were smeary, even by the standards of ancient mono laptops. If they were flat-screened, focus was inconsistent. Large ones were expensive (and by "large" I mean "19 inch"), and you lost some screen area from the bezel.

If you found one that didn't have any of these problems, it was probably enormously expensive. But even your enormously expensive one wouldn't look quite pin-sharp at 1600x1200. (Unless it was truly enormously expensive, and was a 22+ inches diagonal.)

And whatever you did, they took up a huge amount of space, used a vast amount of electricity, and emitted a lot of radiation (though nobody ever seemed to be quite clear on whether this was actually bad for you).

And what nobody seems to remember is how rather unreliable they are. Failure rate for the LCDs I've owned: 0%. For the CRTs? 100%. None made it past six years.

If you like them for games, great. Enjoy your youthful ability to detect those extra 10ms of latency while you still have it, that's what I say! But for a terminal? You're nuts.

I'm not sure they ever released that much radiation. It's hard to find non crackpot sources of information, but in mono displays there's surely not high enough voltages for that. The back of my oscilloscope (a mono display pretty much) mentions X-ray emissiom but on some ridiculously small scale.

I bought a "decommissioned" Sony Trinitron monitor for $200 from a company I worked at at the time. It was 27" flat screen, and glorious, was amazing for gaming and counter-strike.

Now, carrying it up 3 flights of stairs on the other hand almost made the cheap price not worth it. That thing must have weighed 50lbs.

27"! I never saw a monitor that large. I think 22" was the largest. Even TVs didn't go all that much larger than 27", particularly 4:3 ones.

And a Trinitron too! That must have been spitefully expensive to buy...

Sony definitely made a 24" Trinitron monitor: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00004YNSR/

and a 34" widescreen TV: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0002NDFKM/

CRTs that large were pretty rare, though. Monitors tended to stop at 21" (by which point they were a good foot deep, if not more...), and I'm less certain about TVs, but I'd be surprised if even 34" ones were all that common. If nothing else, they're an absolute bugger to move. My parents' 31" widescreen CRT was an absolute monster... my back still twinges just thinking about it.

I used an amber CRT for 17 years. What this is missing is the mottled browning and yellowing from all the cigarette smoke on the beige plastic case. Now what you really need to be retro is a TTY printer. I used to get my work orders through one. No screen, just a seemingly infinite roll of dot matrix paper and a keyboard.

Has anyone tried a "open plan office" term yet?

So work at home people, and people in sane environments, can experience the huge performance boost of an open plan office.

So just vanilla unicode-rvxt or whatever you use, with some really special additions...

1) ghostly reflections of people constantly walking behind you and sometimes glancing at your screen as they walk by in the background as a transparency layer.

2) If you're a glossy screen in a brightly lit office you get torturous reflections causing eyestrain, make sure to include that. If you can't see what you're doing, you should just work harder.

3) A continuous mix of noise plays in the background at random levels, probably stolen from youtube type videos. So dramatic arguments, sports gossip, people asking each other questions to google for them, ringtones and other noisy beepy stuff, all mixed together continuously. If you're distracted, its your fault for being distracted.

Might have to script the background activities although an option to just mash up purely random youtube traffic would be funny. To get people to use it, you could create kind of a directed, scripted story that plays out. This lowers the technological bar to merely being a video player with high transparency and a probably very large video file.

I have no idea if this is a genius idea or mere parody. Probably a work of performance art if done well.

I am aware there are lots of sites that play background audio such as a coffee house or whatever. I'm looking for the open plan office experience, specifically.

As someone who both comes from an environment with epic levels of sarcasm and works remote, I appreciated this comment.

Haha, that's pretty great. As someone who works from home, I think this would make me 1,000x more efficient. Actually, having worked as a reporter in an open plan office ... never mind :)

In a way, LCD monitors allowed creation of the open-plan office. With CRTs, desks had to be deep enough for the tubes (often 18", sometimes a lot more). The stand for the LCD is usually the thickest part of one, and they're thin enough to allow for people to work on opposite sides of a trestle table.

If done right, this could actually be a pretty brilliant indie game. The first level of the game is you just doing some sort of office-work-related puzzle. The second level of the game, which takes awhile to notice, is the plot unfolding in the background, as you overhear phone calls and conversations related to the emails coming into your inbox.

Think "Gone Home", but in an office.

For the ones looking to take this further, there's Cathode[0] (Mac only) - http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/

Cathode is closed source. How can we 'take it further'?

Apologies if my wording gave you a wrong idea. What I meant was that Cathode has a good variety of themes and customization features.

And the sounds are pretty great. The "Heavy" power-on sound is… satisfying: https://soundcloud.com/biohazard-music/cathode-heavy-poweron...

Cathode is objectively much better than cool-retro-term, which while cool, is just not nearly as good. I use both. It was well worth my $5 to support the author of this project. Cathode was also first and cool-retro-term is at least arguably a clone. It's great that it's open-source and cross-platform, but I don't find it usable enough for actual work in Linux, whereas I use Cathode all the time on OS X.

Skeumorphism is trendy again. If it wasn't for watts, I'd get a big CRT back, analog pixels sounds better[1]. Or maybe a Grid Compass http://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/54135-grid-compass-1... ;)

[1] (c) Monster

Now, just set it up to use the VT 220 font, and we're done.

http://christfollower.me/misc/glasstty/index.html

Small details: it seems from the screenshots that the screen 'glows' so that the bezel of the display has a tint of the most prominent color on screen. That's a great touch that makes it look more real than a terminal within a static frame.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8399461

It's surprising to me how much narrower 40 columns is now than it was when I had a real Apple II.

This looks awesome, I just wish it could go full screen on my mac. You can download the OSX dmg here, I almost missed it since it's at the very bottom of the instructions: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/releases

Fullscreen works fine for me (OS X 10.9)

Works fine on Yosemite here. Looks like it has iTerm-ish keyboard bindings too. Pity it doesn't have tabs, otherwise it might be usable as a daily shell.

What's weird on Mac is that it seems to use Command as the Control key.

Looks like a known issue: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/issues/203

The Command key seems to act like the control key.

I gotta say this is a pretty cool app. A lot of the UI seems to be declarative. Very nice, considering donating.

How about actually supporting coloured text, and get new school eye candy with your old school eye candy? :)

It does. You need to go into the terminal settings enable "Chroma Color" and then tweak the value.

Sorry, I meant like xterm256 &c

This was in the frontpage just a few months ago. Edit: On a sidenote, upvote for Skeumorphism !

I'm getting sick of flat design. But let's not go back to skeumorphism. A few years ago, when fake wood textures were all the rage, I remember being so frustrated at some of the interfaces. Lots of awkward metaphors (Oh, I'm supposed to click the inkwell to write a new document?) and poor discoverability (That's a button? I thought it was part of the background!).

The amount of reposts in the last few months is getting stupid.

Not sure what this is supposed to be. It's obviously not meant to be functional. It doesn't look good (rather, it looks purposely bad). And no matter how close to the real thing you make it, it's not going to fool me into feeling like I'm on a CRT when I'm not. So I'm not feeling nostalgic for it either.

The best nostalgic experience I got this year was booting my raspberry pi for the first time, because you can have it boot straight to command line. It brought me back to my first DOS pc, when you had to type "WIN" to run Windows.

Oh god I hate these type of comments.

Please if you have nothing constructive to say, don't be rude and dismiss somebodies hard work. It's infinitely easier to put someone down than it is to actually produce something.

Who is that thin skinned? If you work hard on something, people inevitably shit on it. It's human nature. And someone as talented as this creator is probably used to it by now.

Besides, limiting conversation to just constructive criticism limits the scope of HN. This isn't a support group. It's a discussion forum. We should be free to criticize not only the implementation of a program, but the need to build it in the first place.

What do you hope to achieve with your comment?

> If you work hard on something, people inevitably shit on it. It's human nature. And someone as talented as this creator is probably used to it by now.

This compliment is delivered like an engagement ring in a dog turd.

I'm a certified ridiculous person, but sometimes I really enjoy using bash and Emacs in a full-screen crazy terminal simulator. And I often feel like computers have enough graphics power to look really cool but that they often look really plain instead.

Maybe you need to get your first cup of coffee this Monday morning. Sometimes, humans make things for fun, that serve no practical purpose. They're just neat and have novelty, and the person had fun building it. I can't imagine a better kind of project for showcasing on this website.

This is Hacker News, remember? Hack value is something hackers hold in high esteem. And there are many things that while holding no practical value have huge hack value.

    ln -sf /usr/lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target \
           /etc/systemd/system/default.target

Problem solved.

Maybe you did not read. Here is copy-paste for you:

cool-retro-term

"cool-retro-term is a terminal emulator which mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens. It has been designed to be eye-candy, customizable, and reasonably lightweight."

So:

a) It's supposed to be a "terminal emulator."

b) It does not automatically convert the atoms that make your fancy iMac with retina display into a CRT from the 70s, nor it makes you travels back in time. File a bug for that. However, it does say that it "mimics" it.

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