CRT Terminal — Pack Aesthetic #

The appearance reference for the crt-terminal Pack — the emissive third point of the pack triangle. syntax is warm reflective paper (zine collage, hard-offset shadow); editorial-mono is cool reflective print (flat, art-directed restraint); CRT Terminal is light, not pigment: an 80s phosphor terminal — VT100 / IBM 5151 register — where every element is a small green-glowing screen. The engine and Pipelines are identical; only the dress changes. This doc is what the Critic verifies a crt-terminal Preset against.

This pack exists to stress the roles a color swap never touched: depth is glow, not shadow. Grain is scanline, not paper tooth. Edges are hard pixels, not torn fiber. If a piece re-skins under CRT and still reads broadcast, the Pack contract is real.

Register references: IBM 5151 monochrome display, DEC VT100, Apple II monitor, MU/TH/UR 6000 (Alien), WOPR terminals (WarGames). Period-serious, not retro-game.

Channel Voice #

Precise, machine-calm, a little ominous. The mood is "mission console," not "arcade cabinet." Uniformity is the personality: one type voice, one color at several intensities, everything on the character grid. Where Syntax is hand-made and Editorial Mono is art-directed, CRT Terminal is machine-made — nothing is placed casually; everything aligns.

Palette — one phosphor, several excitations #

Green phosphor (P1 family) on near-black glass. There is one hue; hierarchy comes from intensity (how hard the phosphor is driven), never from a second color. Resolved through the Pack manifest, never inline.

Role	Value	Use
substrate / glass	`#070b08`	near-black screen glass, faint green cast
phosphor ink	`#45ff6e`	primary text and strokes — the driven phosphor
hot core	`#d9ffe0`	white-green overdriven centers (title moments, cursor)
dim phosphor	`#1e8f3d`	secondary text, rules, de-emphasised labels
ghost	`#0f3a1c`	persistence residue, faint grid lines, dividers

Emissive, not printed: light values glow on dark glass — the exact inversion of both reflective packs. The "ink" is the brightest thing in frame.
No second hue. No amber (adjacent to Syntax yellow), no cyan (Editorial Mono's mark), no warm anything. Alerts/accents are brighter or blinking phosphor, not a different color.

Type System #

Modern mono wearing the phosphor — the period feel comes from the material (glow, persistence, grid), never from pixelated glyphs. One family everywhere: the engine's mono stack (JetBrains Mono — already bundled for the Syntax kicker thread), all weights, generous tracking in caps for labels. Crisp at 4K; A+ text is non-negotiable (bitmap faces read retro-game at 3840×2160 and fail long-body readability — rejected).

Titles: mono, hot-core intensity, optional character-grid reveal.
Body: phosphor ink, looser leading (scanlines need air between lines).
Labels/kickers: dim phosphor caps — the terminal's status-line voice.

Surface Treatment — the screen material #

The defining structural inversions, and the roles they exercise:

Depth is glow. *.depth resolves to a phosphor bloom halo, never a drop shadow — a shadow implies an object above paper; a screen has neither. Intensity scales with the element's excitation (hot core blooms widest).
Edges are hard. edge-treatment: none — pixel-crisp element boundaries, no torn fiber, no soft feather. The character grid is the only permissible edge texture.
Grain is scanline. The grain/material roles resolve to a subtle horizontal scanline raster + faint phosphor triad shimmer inside element pixels — a screen texture, not paper tooth. Low contrast; visible at pause, invisible in motion.
Persistence. Phosphor decay is the pack's signature material behavior: moving/exiting elements may leave a brief ghost-intensity trail (deterministic, frame-driven — never wall-clock).
Pointer. cursor-trail.pointer resolves to a block cursor (▮), with the trail as phosphor persistence.

Screen scope — per-element emissive; full-frame only when opaque #

Transparent overlays: each element is its own small emissive screen — glow, scanlines, persistence live inside the element's pixels (the ADR-0030 emissive-screen shaderPass pattern). The footage underneath is never treated: it isn't ours.
Opaque segments/bumpers: the pack's chrome appends the physical crt-tube effect — a flat-glass beam raster (gaussian scanlines that swell on bright strokes), subtle shadow-mask texture, rounded-glass bezel with inner shadow, and bright-pass halation — the whole frame is the terminal. The chrome dial must keep small dim-phosphor text above the G5 floor and hairline form dress must span ≥1 raster pitch or the beam nulls it.
No curvature, ever. Barrel distortion fights composition geometry, safe-areas, and reflow; the flat-glass late-period CRT is the claim — the chrome runs curvature: 0 even though the general crt-tube effect supports it.

Motion Vocabulary Preferences #

A subset of the shared vocabulary, biased to the machine end: type-on / character reveal (the native terminal entrance), sharp snaps (sharp ease — instant excitation, phosphor-decay settle), stroke-draw (a plotter sweep), cursor-blink beats as punctuation. Phosphor persistence gives exits their character: elements decay rather than slide away. Avoid: bouncy, tape-down, settled-place paper physics, anything hand-made or jittery — a machine does not wobble.

Anti-Aesthetic — what CRT Terminal is not #

Not retro-game kitsch: no bitmap/pixel fonts, no CP437 box-art, no rainbow ANSI palettes, no chromatic "glitch" abuse.
No second hue — one phosphor at several intensities. Amber and cyan are other packs' property.
No shadows of any kind — depth is bloom. A drop shadow under CRT is a pipeline bug by definition.
No paper artifacts: no torn edges, no tape, no grain-as-tooth, no collage.
No curvature / barrel distortion; no full-frame treatment on transparent overlays (the footage is not ours to scanline).
Not nostalgic-cute: if a move reads "arcade," it's wrong; the register is mission console.