Cool Retro Term vs Rio
Cool Retro Term
github.com
Rio
rioterm.comSide by side
| Figure | Cool Retro Term | Rio |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Terminal Emulators | 8.8 (#2) | 7.4 (#36) |
| Spec score · Terminal apps | 8.0 (#24) | 7.4 (#38) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | Cool Retro Term is a terminal emulator designed to mimic the look and feel of old cathode tube screens. | Rio is a hardware-accelerated GPU terminal emulator designed to run on desktops and in browsers. |
| Supported platforms | linux,macos | macOS,Windows,Linux |
Plans
In their own words
Cool Retro Term
Cool Retro Term is a free, open-source terminal emulator for Linux and macOS that imitates the appearance of cathode-ray tube screens. The project describes it as customizable and reasonably lightweight. A context menu exposes color, font, and visual-effect settings. Community profiles can add flicker, scanline rasterization, screen curvature, static noise, and burn-in effects, while the wiki invites users to share themes and provides JSON examples. Release notes list support for multiple tabs and windows, plus shortcuts for tab management. Cool Retro Term uses the QML port of qtermwidget, a terminal widget based on Konsole. Linux users can download an AppImage or find packages in repositories for distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. macOS users can download a DMG. Build information covers Qt6 requirements, Linux Qt5 dependencies, and qmake instructions. Installation, build, theme, and widget guidance appears in the project wiki.