Nostalgic about the past? Get a slice of the past by installing retro terminal app cool-retro-term which, as the name suggests, is both cool and retro at the same.
Do you remember the time when there were CRT monitors everywhere and the terminal screen used to flicker? You don’t need to be old to have witnessed it. If you watch movies set in early 90’s, you’ll see plenty of CRT monitors with green/B&W command prompt. It has a geeky aura which makes it cooler.
If you are tired of terminal appearance and you need something cool and ‘new’, cool-retro-term will give you a vintage terminal appearance to relive the past. You also can change its color, animation kind, and add some effect to it.

Install Cool Retro Term in Linux
There are various ways to install Cool Retro Term in Linux. One distro-agnostic way would be to use Snap. If your Linux distribution has Snap support enabled, you can use this command to install cool-retro-term:
sudo snap install cool-retro-term --classic
Ubuntu users can find it in the Software Center as well.
If you don’t want to use Snap package, don’t worry. There are other ways to install it.
Install cool-retro-term in Ubuntu based Linux distributions
There are PPAs available for easily installing cool-retro-term on Ubuntu-based distributions such as Linux Mint, elementary OS, Linux Lite etc.
For Ubuntu 18.04, 18.10, 19.04, Linux Mint 19 and higher, use this PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vantuz/cool-retro-term
sudo apt update
sudo apt install cool-retro-term
For Ubuntu 16.04 and Linux Mint 18 series, use this PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:noobslab/apps
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install cool-retro-term
Install cool-retro-term in Arch based Linux distributions
Installing cool-retro-term in Arch based Linux distributions such as Antergos and Manjaro, use the following command:
sudo pacman -S cool-retro-term
Install cool-retro-term from source code
For installing this application from source code, you need to install a number of dependencies first. Some of the know dependencies in Ubuntu based distributions are:
sudo apt-get install git build-essential qmlscene qt5-qmake qt5-default qtdeclarative5-dev qtdeclarative5-controls-plugin qtdeclarative5-qtquick2-plugin libqt5qml-graphicaleffects qtdeclarative5-dialogs-plugin qtdeclarative5-localstorage-plugin qtdeclarative5-window-plugin
Known dependencies for other distributions can be found on the github of cool-retro-term.
Now use commands below to compile the program:
git clone https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term.git cd cool-retro-term qmake && make
Once the program is compiled, you can run it with this command:
./cool-retro-term
If you like to have this app in program menu for quick access so that you won’t have to run it manually each time with the commands, you can use the command below:
sudo cp cool-retro-term.desktop /usr/share/applications
You can learn some more terminal tricks here. Enjoy the vintage terminal in Linux :)


On Cosmic 18.10 had to edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vantuz-ubuntu-cool-retro-term-bionic.list and change “cosmic” to “bionic” – then I could install. On both Cosmic and Bionic, the snap won’t launch for me, kinda hate snaps anyway. Also – if you like this and want to support the developer and have an iPad – there’s a paid version of this for iOS…
You could have used the PPA. One of the PPA is available for 18.10.
I couldn’t get it to install from the PPA in 18.10, or 19.04 – had to change either cosmic or disco in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vantuz-ubuntu-cool-retro-term-disco.list (e.g. on Disco Dingo “sed -i ‘s/disco/bionic/g’ /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vantuz-ubuntu-cool-retro-term-disco.list” – before I could successfully apt update and apt install). In both 18.10 and 19.04 it complains the PPA doesn’t have a “Release” file for either :
E: The repository ‘http://ppa.launchpad.net/vantuz/cool-retro-term/ubuntu disco Release’ does not have a Release file.
N: Updating from such a repository can’t be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.
N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.
Oh! In that case, installing it via Snap would be a better option.
Crashes invariably after fifteen seconds to two minutes
cool-retro-term: ../../src/xcb_conn.c:186: write_vec: Assertion `!c->out.queue_len’ failed.
Aborted
OS: Mint 17.3 rosa
Kernel: x86_64 Linux 4.4.0-111-generic
Resolution: 3840×1080
DE: KDE 4.14.2
WM: KWin
WM Theme: Aurorae
GTK Theme: oxygen-gtk [GTK2/3]
CPU: AMD A8-5545M APU with Radeon HD Graphics @ 4x 1.7GHz [65.0°C]
GPU: Gallium 0.4 on AMD ARUBA
RAM: 16GB
Worked fine on Mint 18 but with 19 :
HTTP Error 404: Not Found
Cannot add PPA: ”This PPA does not support bionic”.
no support for ubuntu 17.10?