Phosphor: a terminal for the Hipster generation

Hipters are into old things and making them cool again.  Velco shoes?  Tapered pants?  Cassette tapes?  Yep, they're back in style, although computer nerds maybe never knew they were gone!

With all things old now becoming cool again, why not get back to the Terminal with your computer use?

But not any old terminal; the X Screensaver named 'Phosphor' can also be used as a terminal emulator, complete with slow screen updates and a fading green phosphorus look.  It's much like the terminals you maybe grew up with, or the terminals that you see in hollywood movies:

You can adjust the -delay flag to a lower number to get a more responsive terminal, and adjust the -scale to a larger number for a larger font, but the fading green text and the slow-to-appear letters are the draw of this old-school terminal emulator.

Install the 'xscreensaver-gl' or similar package to make sure you have this; run as root 'updatedb && locate phosphor' if it doesn't install to '/usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor'


On a Debian system, run this to launch your Phosphor terminal (all one line):

shell$  /usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor -program /bin/bash -scale 1 -delay 200

More options available with:

shell$  /usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor --help

Do you dig it, hip cat?