A Cathode Ray What Now?
Moving from that to a terminal that had an integral screen and a keyboard with light-touch keys was game-changing.
You typed, and the computer responded.
Quickly, silently, and without the desk shaking.
Those early terminals had a large desktop footprint.
The biggest space hog was the screen.
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The visible portion of the screen was just part of a very large glass component.
They were calledcathode-ray tubesor CRTs.
The stream scanned across the screen pixel by pixel, illuminating those points that needed to be on.
The process was then repeated from the top of the screen.
All that for a text-only, monochrome display.
Graphics and color came much later.
CRT screens were expensive, heavy, fragile, and consumed a lot of electrical power.
They were eventually replaced by the flat-screen technology that we use today.
Why recreate those archaic displays on your Linux computers modern flat screen?
Theres no other reason.
Theres no need to do it.
If you think it looks neat, give it a go.
It mimics the appearance of a range of vintage displays, but it is a fully functional terminal window.
It might be a novelty, but its a working novelty.
Within a few keystrokes youll see its icon.
poke the icon to start CRT.
CRT will open in its default guise of a monochrome amber screen.
It has all of its bells and whistles enabled, which might be a bit much.
The color scheme is obviously that of an amber screen with orange characters on a dark brown background.
The curve of the old glass screen is replicated too.
So far so good.
The background of the window is showing a scrambled, snowy effect.
Its meant to represent the static interference you could get on very early or low-grade equipment.
On top of those two, if you look closely youll see very fast trembling on the characters.
This was a phenomenon called jitter.
Buten masse, I found them a bit overwhelming.
Thankfully, they can be turned off.
In fact, theres a lot of tweaking that you’re able to do.
Then choose from one of the CRT emulations.
This is Monochrome Green, which is like a generic green screen monitor.
This is the IBM 3278 profile.
It even has mixed case.
All the profiles are still affected by the static interference, glow line, and jitter effects.
To remove these effects, right-tap the CRT window and select controls.
In the configs dialog, poke the Effects tab.
To turn them off, deselect the Static Noise, Jitter, and Glow Line check boxes.
To leave them on but dial them down a little, use the slider controls to reduce their intensity.
I turned them off completely, and the result was a more peaceful experience for my aging eyes.
To make your tweaks permanent, save them to a new profile.
poke the General tab, then poke the Save button.
it’s possible for you to even control how much curvature the screen has.
We’ll use the whereis command to do that.
We need to pass that path to the gsettings command.
Now, if we right-hit the desktop and select Open in Terminal, CRT will open.
On Ubuntu, Ctrl+Alt+T opens a new terminal window.
Thatll open CRT now, too.
Theres a fair few steps, but its straightforward enough.
We need to make surePython 3and a few dependencies are installed.
These may already be installed on your Linux computer.
If not, youll find them in your repositories.
Now we can use pip to roll out the Nautlilus extension.
Youll only need the –break-system-packages option on Ubuntu 24.04.
We need to update the schemas.
We need to make use of dconf-editor.
If you don’t already have it on your machine, you’ll find it in your repositories.
Toggle the Use Default Value slider to off, and enter cool-retro-term in the Custom Value text field.
nudge the Apply button.
A new menu option, Open cool-retro-term Here, appears in the right-click context menu in Nautilus.
To restore the default behavior, youll need to uninstall the nautilus-open-any-terminal extension.
Just setting the slider back to Use Default Selection isnt enough.
You only need to use the –break-system-packages if youre on Ubuntu 24.04.
Either way, reset Nautilus and you’ll restore its default behavior.
The attention to detail that has gone into giving it an authentic look and feel is impressive.
It’s worth playing with, if only to see how far we’ve come.
