cool-retro-term

cool-retro-term is a terminal emulator for Linux and macOS that imitates the look of old cathode-ray tube monitors. The README calls it eye candy that aims to be customizable and reasonably lightweight. It is built with Qt6 and QML on qmltermwidget, a QML port of the qtermwidget component from Konsole, so the emulation underneath is a conventional one and the novelty is in how the output is drawn. It is for people who want a retro-looking terminal for everyday use, screenshots or demos.

Appearance is the whole point. The effects panel has sliders for bloom, burn-in, static noise, jitter, glow line, screen curvature, ambient light, flickering, horizontal sync, RGB shift and frame shininess. Separate controls cover brightness, contrast, margins, screen radius, frame size and window opacity. Text can be drawn with no rasterization or in scanline, pixel, subpixel or modern modes.

There is no config file to edit. Colors, fonts and effects are set through the context menu and its settings window. Built-in profiles reproduce specific looks, among them Default Amber, Monochrome Green, Deep Blue, Commodore 64, Commodore PET, Apple ][, Atari 400, IBM VGA 8x16, IBM 3278 Reborn and E-Ink. Custom profiles can be saved, loaded, and imported or exported as files to share with others.

Releases ship as an AppImage for Linux and a dmg for macOS, and Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch package it in their official repositories. It has no ligature or inline image support and no scripting interface. The effects can be turned down or off with the sliders when they get in the way of reading dense output.