Shell

Retro Vibes: CRT Glow for Your Ghostty Terminal

I’ve put together a few GLSL shaders that make Ghostty look like an old-school CRT terminal.

Thijs Kok

Thijs Kok

— 2 min read

In a previous post, I shared how I started using Ghostty, a fast, GPU-accelerated terminal - with first-class support for shaders.

This week, I took it a step further.

CRT Shader Magic

I’ve put together a few GLSL shaders that make Ghostty look like an old-school CRT terminal — complete with:

  • Support for 3 retro colors:
    • Amber glow
    • Green phosphor
    • Blue phosphor
  • Subtle background glow
  • Optional scanlines & flicker

They give Ghostty a soft, glowing, vintage vibe that actually makes working in the terminal feel kinda cozy.

How to Use

Getting shaders to work in Ghostty is pretty straightforward — just be aware that if something’s off, the shader won’t load and you won’t see any error messages. Here’s how I set them up on macOS:

  1. Clone the repo with the shader files.
  2. Move the shader files to ~/.config/ghostty/shaders (create the directory if it isn't there).
  3. In your Ghostty config file, add this line:

    custom-shader = /Users/<your-username>/.config/ghostty/shaders/amber-crt.glsl

    Replace with your actual macOS username.
    (I found the full absolute path works more reliably than ~.)
  4. Reload your Ghostty configuration.

You can replace amber-crt.glsl with either the green-crt.glsl or blue-crt.glsl shader for a different vibe.

Enjoy the glow!

That’s it! Enjoy your glowing, retro terminal setup. Feels like hacking in the ’80s — minus the floppy disks.

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