Ghostty After Dark

I want a terminal with some character. I also want to be able to read it, which rules out a surprising amount of character.

The Ghostty experiments explore that boundary through shaders: scanlines, colour treatments, cursor effects and other visual noise. The source collection includes work based on hackr-sh/ghostty-shaders alongside local experiments. Some custom files carry Gemini CLI generation credits; using them here does not turn upstream or generated work into code I personally authored.

Keep the effect out of the way

Several local treatments take a more selective approach than distorting the entire terminal image. A sharp CRT-style shader avoids coordinate warping. Other treatments use luminance to distinguish text from the background before applying colour or texture. A cursor-trail experiment concentrates its effect around movement rather than changing every resting line of text.

Those are implementation choices visible in the shader source. Whether a particular treatment remains comfortable during sustained use is a separate, visual judgement. A convincing description of a luminance mask is not a screenshot, and a screenshot is not a performance measurement.

The configuration notes also describe overrides and helper scripts for changing treatments. Keeping the experimental settings distinct makes it easier to return to an understandable configuration after trying something excessive.

This is a set of visual studies, not a claim that decoration improves every workflow. The useful version of the experiment keeps the atmosphere without making a semicolon a search-and-rescue operation.