cool-retro-term — retro CRT terminal emulator

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cool-retro-term is an open-source terminal emulator that mimics the look and feel of old cathode-ray tube screens, complete with phosphor glow, scanline flicker, screen curvature, and noise effects. Reach for it when you need a visually striking terminal for screencasts, livestreams, conference talks, or demo recordings, or simply want a workspace with personality instead of a plain black rectangle. Appearance is configurable through a context menu: built-in profiles for different eras (Amber, Green, IBM DOS, and others), with independent controls for brightness, geometry distortion, noise intensity, and glow color. Built with QML on top of the QML port of qtermwidget (Konsole), it requires Qt6 and runs on Linux and macOS. Installation is available via AppImage or dmg from the releases page, or through official distribution repositories on Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. Under the hood it runs your existing shell unchanged, so scripts and CLI tools continue to work as before. The focus is visual styling of the terminal interface, not extending shell functionality. Heavy visual effects put load on the GPU, and strong distortion reduces readability of small fonts — not every workflow suits it for all-day use.