Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software

Cool-Retro-Term 1.0.0

It wasn't so long ago that the quality of your monitor was judged by how flat the screen could be made, and how close together the cathode ray tube could fire photons to produce as many colors as possible. But now that we're in the "post CRT" era, we're inundated with flatness and tight pixels. This may be why curved monitors are the latest thing, and also why Cool-Retro-Term exists.

Cool-Retro-Term is a wonderful terminal emulator, in the truest sense. While hosting your terminal session, it emulates many of the physical characteristics of ancient displays, rendering one-time flaws in real time on your modern GPU. The default profile, for example, recreates one of those lovely amber VT220 terminals, complete with screen curve, flickering, persistence, and glowing interference. Different profiles switch from this to the green of an Apple ][ display, or the misfiring rays of some random IBM PC-AT clone. The authenticity of the appearance is uncanny, and takes you back 20 and 30 years if you're old enough to have experienced the real hardware.

All of these effects are implemented using a selection of shaders with some excellently chosen fonts. The shader values can be changed, and they include bloom, curve, static burning, glow, jitter, ambient light, flickering, and RGB shift. When combined with different fonts and colors, you can recreate the ancient displays of almost any hardware and save this as a new profile. Unless you're a film director working on a sequel to War Games, it's not going to make you more productive, but it will definitely make you smile.

Project Website

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

Based on Qt QML and qtermwidget (Konsole), Cool-Retro-Term is as good in operation as it is in looks.

Terminal word processor

WordGrinder 0.6-1

Back in the age of early CRT monitors, letters, reports, and doctoral theses would all be produced using a word processor with a text interface. There was no graphical interface. The world's most terrible acronym, WYSIWYG, was still a secret, and regardless of whether a word was italic, bold, or written in Comic Sans, the text would look just like any other text on the screen. Instead of changing these styles visually, old-fashioned word processors would use inserted codes and shortcuts. This made them harder to use, but crucially, it also made them lightning fast and efficient, just like using vim over gedit or kate. So, it's not surprising that there are still WordStar aficionados, for example, clinging to their DOS word processor almost two decades after its last release.

That's why it's so good to see a new(er) addition to this venerable genre. WordGrinder is a word processor for the command line, rather than a text editor for the command line. It's been developed to create text documents that you'd normally create in LibreOffice, only from within a fast and efficient text interface. It will even output the same formats, including ODT, alongside more text-centric formats like HTML, Markdown, and LaTex. The always on-screen word count and the flat menus, file requester, and search and replace panes, make this more friendly than vim and better for letters than nano. It's also an excellent option if you happen to have a Raspberry Pi working as a USB print hub and want to quickly create a good-looking document you can print and send without having to run a graphical interface, or even connect to a machine locally. And if you're still using WordStar in DOSBOX, perhaps you can finally reconfigure that muscle memory.

Project Website

http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/index.html

It may be a simple command-line word processor, but it's comprehensive enough to include Unicode support.

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