 One of the most important programs on any Linux system is the terminal over the years. I've tried dozens of different terminal emulators and today I wanted to try one that I think is truly unique, truly different. It stands apart from the crowd and that terminal emulator is called Cool Retro Term. So let me switch over to my desktop and let me go ahead and launch Cool Retro Term. And this is what it looks like out of the box. By default, it uses a amber color. So as you can see, it kind of mimics those old school monochrome amber colored monitors that were very popular like in the 1980s when I was a kid, when I was in elementary school and we had computer labs. I mean, this is the kind of monitors that we sit down in front of. This is what a computer was and it mimics it rather faithfully as far as the curvature around the screen because those were the old CRT monitors that kind of bulged around the edges and in the center, you know, the center was a little closer to you than the outside edges of the screen. And you had the screen flicker and then you had these annoying lines sometimes that would travel across the screen. You can see this glow line is traveling across the screen. And this is truly a blast from the past. When I first launched this, I've got to admit I laughed for a couple of minutes because it brought back so many memories and you can configure cool retro term. There's a lot of customization you can do with it by default though, you get this amber color. If I do a quick LS, you can see it's mainly monochrome. There's some different shadings to the amber color. And at least with the default amber color scheme, it's reasonably easy to read. I don't struggle necessarily reading this, some of the other configurations I do have trouble reading. If I wanted to open something in Vim, I will say one annoying thing is when I open a text file in Vim, obviously the background becomes much lighter and overall, this becomes very hard to read. Right. I would never want to edit a file in Vim using this default amber monochrome color scheme here in cool retro term. Let me quit out of that. For those wondering how Emacs in the terminal looks with cool retro term, honestly, it looks about the same. Oddly enough, Emacs in the terminal takes a long time to load in cool retro term for some reason. That's not normal in any of my other terminal emulators, but it took a minute here inside cool retro term. But when it finally does load, it's a lot like Vim, right? It's a really light background that's not a lot of contrast and is very difficult to read. But as I said, you can configure it a little bit if I right click on the terminal and I go to settings. By default, it's using the default amber color scheme, but if I wanted to, I could double click monochrome green and we changed to a green color scheme, which was a popular monochrome color for monitors. It usually, especially back in the 80s, if you weren't using an amber colored monitor, typically they were using the green colored monitors. I will say I find the green a little harder to read, actually, than the amber. Just slightly. Some of the other ones, there is green scan lines, which is not quite as monochrome. You can actually see that instead of just being all shades of green, there's a little yellow here. There's a little red here because actually my LS command does have color. If I actually opened the alacrity terminal and did a LS, you know, I've got these various values in my LS command that they actually have different colors. Well, in this, the green scan lines theme here inside cool retro term, there is a little bit more differentiation. I can tell, for example, the W in this column is supposed to be red. Now it kind of looks red and this here kind of looks yellow rather than green. Some of the other themes just quickly, there is default pixelated, which honestly just looks like a standard terminal other than it's got the blurring going on. It's got the glow line that travels across it. But other than that, you notice the curvature of the screen is a lot less, so it doesn't bulge around the edges. So this might be something, if you find some of the other color schemes really hard to read and annoying, this one seems to be pretty easy on the eyes. Here is Apple too. Let's check that out. This one, man, that bevels around the screen, the curvature of it. Everything is kind of distorted. I would think long term this one here would be really, really hard to read from a historical point of view. Though I do think that is a rather cool effect. I kind of like that theme. And then you have vintage. Vintage is horrible as far as readability. You can see it flickers and sometimes you get some wave effects going on. So this is actually historically accurate as well. I've actually sat down in front of monitors that were this hard to read in real life. But nowadays I would never volunteer to sit down in front of something like that. We have IBM DOS, which is very difficult to read. You can see like all the fonts are really blurry. And yeah, that's a tough one on the eyes as well. IBM 3278 is actually very readable. So this one here, I do another LS. This looks pretty good. If I open Vim, we still have the same problem really in all the themes. Or when you open something in Vim, the background, it's no longer as dark as it you would expect it to be. Now it's that light green and that's just, it's really tough on the eyes. The last default theme here is called Futuristic. Futuristic is actually pretty normal looking other than some of the glow line that's traveling across it and you have some pixelation. But other than that it looks much more like a normal terminal emulator than probably any of the other themes. And just because these are the standard themes that ship with cool retro term, you can change them. I'm actually going to go back to the default amber theme. But if you wanted to, you could go in here to terminal and you can change the scaling, the font widths, if you want to get into some of the coloring, I mean, right, it's a monochrome monitor, right? So there is the monochrome color, but you could adjust that if you wanted to. You could also go into effects and you can change the strength of the various effects that are going on in the terminal such as bloom, burn in, static noise jitter, glow line, screen curvature, ambient light, flickering, horizontal sink and RGB shift. So for example, the screen curvature is set to 30% by default in the amber color scheme. But maybe, you know, I wanted to change the screen curvature to let's bump it up to 55%. You know, you can see I really made a major difference. As a matter of fact, I would say I've probably started to venture into making that a little less readable because 30%, 30% I don't mind really for maximum readability. I'd probably bump that down, maybe like the 15%, yeah, I would probably go with that. But for now, I'll actually move that back to 30%. I just wanted to show that these sliders do work and probably some of the things that would really affect readability, static noise, which for the default amber color is only set to 12%, but some of the other color schemes are really static-y and man, that is, that's really tough to read. I'm going to bump that back down to, I think it was set to 12% by default. I'm actually going to get out of the settings. I think one of the reasons that people would find cool retro term, a really interesting terminal emulator is because one of the things that a lot of people find enjoyable at the terminal is running retro games especially. For example, I've got My Man installed. My Man is a Pac-Man clone that is Freedom Source software. It's available in a lot of Linux distributions, repositories. In the Arch user repository, the AUR, you'll find My Man. But if I enter this and agree to the terms and everything, let me hit Enter and it's going to give me character names and what their color is on the screen would be. Of course, everything is going to be amber here in this monochrome monitor, but let's go ahead and start Pac-Man and I am C, the C character and the Vimkeys do work as far as direction and I ran straight into a ghost. Ready? Okay. Let's see. I can actually get this. I did the exact same thing on the opposite end. Okay. So I'm terrible at Pac-Man, so let me quit out of Pac-Man. If I wanted to, I could play some other cool retro games in cool retro term. There's one called Moon Buggy. This one is also in the AUR, those of you using an Arch-based distribution or if you're on Debian or Fedora, I bet you'll find both My Man and Moon Buggy in the standard repositories. They're old games. They've been around forever and they're really cool games. If I start Moon Buggy, you'll be able to see what this is. Basically we got to hop the old there, which I didn't do a good job of. So let's start that again, but you can see. I'm on a road and there's going to be some potholes that I have to jump the buggy with. There we go. Now that I've kind of got it down, of course you got to watch the widths do change slightly and it's very easy to not time this right because the jumps are not very big, but this is Moon Buggy. The first level I can get past after that starts getting a little trickier because the holes in the next level actually get bigger. There's almost no room for error. That one almost got me and that is Moon Buggy. Let me go ahead and quit out of that. So I would probably throw some old school retro games on here. Maybe something like those of you that like Dungeons & Dragons style games, maybe do something like Nethack or do some old school tell net games or games that you can play over SSH. I think that is where something like Cool Retro Term I think really shines and even though we have like a hundred different terminal emulators on Linux, they kind of all do the same thing. Cool Retro Term again really stands out because it tries to harken back to the days of the past. Those of us that lived through those early years with these monochrome monitor computers, I think we'll find Cool Retro Term very nostalgic because some of my fondest memories as a kid were actually using those old school amber colored monochrome monitor computers and playing games like the original Oregon Trail, Donkey Kong and Pong and things like that, Asteroid and Centipede and all those really old school retro games. And now I can actually relive those memories now through Cool Retro Term. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Dustin K. James, Matt Maxim, Mimit, Michael Mitchell, Paul West. Why don't you ball at me Alan, Armored Dragon, Chuck, Commander Henry, Diokai, Dylan, Greg Marsh, Romer, Yon, Ollie's Andrew, Paul, Peace, Arch and Fedora, Latisse for Los Red Profits, Steven, Tools, Devler and Willie. These guys, they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This Quit Look at Cool Retro Term would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all of my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community, if you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon. Peace. Cool Retro Term is almost as bad on the eyes as those old CRT monitors.