Terminal countdown timer

At a glance

Why a terminal, and why it flickers

The origin story of the terminal skin, from the people who drew it.

The terminal skin came from a simple observation: the people most allergic to timers are the people who spend all day in one. A pomodoro app that looks like a consumer product feels like a toy on a developer's second monitor — but a green readout in a hex frame looks like instrumentation, and instrumentation gets left running. So the brief was a CRT that happens to count down: something you would believe was rendered by the machine itself.

The CRT tropes are all earned, not pasted on. The glyphs that rain faintly in the background are pre-rendered into a sprite atlas — katakana, hex digits, operators — because drawing text per glyph per frame is what makes fake terminals lag. A scanline pattern is laid over everything at 4-pixel intervals, darkening one row in four, the way a real tube draws. The whole screen sits under a heavy vignette so the centre readout stays legible. And every so often, briefly, the frame glitches — a half-second tear that you can tune from rare to often, or switch off for screens that are being recorded.

The centrepiece instruments were designed to be read at a glance. Around the rim runs the tick ring: your session sliced into equal ticks that drain as time passes, so a 25-minute block reads at any distance without parsing digits. Inside, an oscilloscope traces a waveform whose signal dies as the session runs out — the amplitude you keep is the time you keep. Status strings stamp themselves under the readout: // STANDBY while idle, // STREAM ACTIVE while running, // TIME EXPIRED when the ring is gone. The hostname is a quiet SYS://TIMER.COOL in the corner, because every fake terminal needs a host.

Green was never in doubt — P1 phosphor green is the colour the genre dreams in. But real terminals came in more colours than lore remembers: amber for the machines that wanted to be read all day, and a cold ice-blue for anyone whose monitor never left 1984. They are one click away in scene settings.

How the scene moves

• Idle. Glyph rain falls slowly, the hex frame rotates, and the status line reads // STANDBY. The oscilloscope idles.
• Running. The tick ring drains slice by slice with the countdown, the oscilloscope's signal dies proportionally, and the status stamps // STREAM ACTIVE.
• The last stretch. The ring is nearly gone and the scope's waveform is nearly flat — the machine is running out of signal, visibly.
• Zero. The square-wave arpeggio fires, the readout stamps // TIME EXPIRED, and the red-tinted glyphs hold the screen until you reset. The readout counts up +mm:ss overtime meanwhile.

Make it yours

The sliders button in the bottom control row opens Scene settings. Choices are stored in your browser and survive reloads; nothing is sent anywhere.

Two shared panels live in the same place for every skin. Sound picks the finish chime (or “match the skin”), sets the volume, and adds an optional tick for each of the last ten seconds. Display moves the countdown readout — bottom, top, centre, bottom-left or bottom-right — and recolours it: follow theme, warm white, white, gold, ice blue or coral.

Copy-paste links

The sound it makes

When the ring drains, the machine reports completion the way machines do: a brisk four-note square-wave arpeggio, three answering blips, and a low triangle under it all. Like everything in timer.cool, the sound is synthesized by the browser at the moment it plays — no audio files, nothing to download. The Sound panel can swap in a bell, digital beep, wood block or alarm, add a tick to each of the last ten seconds, or you can mute with M.

On a projector or TV

On a demo-day projector the terminal skin reads as part of the setup, not an interruption — set a 5-minute slot, press F, and the screen stays in character while the room counts down. While a timer runs, the page holds a wake lock so the display does not dim mid-demo.

The keyboard map: Space start/pause, F fullscreen, R reset, M mute, +/− give or take a minute while running, L repeat. Two honest limits: on an iPhone the ringer switch silences web audio, and aggressive battery-saver modes can override the wake lock on some devices.

Who the terminal is for

Questions