Pixel Shaders in Windows Terminal

This reminds me. At my college, it was required in our first semester that we make a windows command prompt based game.<p>Not having much love for text adventures, some of us got clever and figured out how to take over the buffer and draw characters. So, we made games with ascii heros, traps and enemies etc.<p>But one group took this to another level. They found the function to reduce the font size. They decreased it down to where it was about the size of a pixel or near enough. Then implemented a full CPU based renderer with perspective correct texture mapping and shaders.

Shame this doesn&#x27;t come with some screenshots. I assume people will eventually be able to recreate the kinds of effects that cool retro term has.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Swordfish90&#x2F;cool-retro-term" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Swordfish90&#x2F;cool-retro-term</a>

Why often there is no screenshot for purely visual things?

Four requests for screenshots, so I opened a documentation ticket! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;terminal&#x2F;issues&#x2F;8960" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;terminal&#x2F;issues&#x2F;8960</a> Good idea all.

Is there a way to get this working using the Microsoft Store version of Windows Terminal? I&#x27;ve tried editing %appdata%\Local\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\settings.json and nothing changed.<p>I tried to update C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_1.5.10271.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\defaults.json but it requires SYSTEM privileges to edit... I wanted to check this out badly but I am at a loss...

This sounds very interesting, I wish there were a screenshot to demo this inversion effect

I was hoping this would provide framebuffer-like functionality in the terminal window instead of &quot;just&quot; a way to apply image posteffects.<p>A proper pixel framebuffer terminal standard fast enough to be updated at refresh rate would allow a lot of interesting terminal applications which would live somewhere between Curses UIs and &quot;proper&quot; UI applications which require a whole window system!<p>Current &quot;render pixels to the terminal&quot; standards like iTerm2&#x27;s ability to display images, or the &quot;Sixels&quot; standard are unfortunately too slow to render colored images at display refresh rate (Sixels is just barely fast enough to render two colors).<p>I&#x27;ve been playing around with running home computer emulators in terminal windows (for instance here&#x27;s a &quot;C64 in Docker&quot; limited to rendering characters: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;floooh&#x2F;docker-c64" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;floooh&#x2F;docker-c64</a>), imagine if this could run with actual pixel graphics in terminal windows :)<p>PS: here&#x27;s an abondend attempt to render the C64 framebuffer via Sixels (too slow unfortunately to be practical): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;floooh&#x2F;chips-test&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;examples&#x2F;ascii&#x2F;c64-sixel.c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;floooh&#x2F;chips-test&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;examples&#x2F;as...</a>

Can we get the basics right? Right now putty is still much better than Windows Terminal and its written 20 years ago by someone who still can&#x27;t afford a domain name.

Programming graphics is always fun. I liked having pixel shader running in phone&#x27;s home screen background. It was a box-breathing animation that would make me slow down the breathing anytime I saw it. It&#x27;s a nice conversation starter as people often notice animated background.

Any cool, visual tech should provide a video of it in action.

You should insert some screenshots on the Readme.

There&#x27;s a ton of retro shaders for the retroarch emulation front-end. Porting those would probably be a good start.

Anyone know how these are used?<p>Is the texture they operate on just the whole terminal window?

Nice. Now can you please fix the horrendous input latency?

It would be neat to see something like this in alacritty

What about any hit to performance? I like to know the terminal is not bogged down for some reason. Also, I&#x27;m curious the types of things already done with such shaders in the terminal?

I just want a solid terminal like iterm2, terminal.app or gnome terminal for Windows. I never saw a Windows terminal that renders fonts nicely

I guess this is cool, but maybe they should focus on actually making Windows Terminal into a usable terminal emulator first. I&#x27;ve found so many bugs with it and it still doesn&#x27;t even have a GUI for its settings.