Charcoal UI

Faulty Terminal

An old monitor full of glyph noise: rows scroll and flicker, bands of corruption tear across, scanlines and curved glass sit on top, and the brightness breathes.

  • Category: Backgrounds
  • Licence: Charcoal UI Pro
  • Built with: React 19, Tailwind CSS 4, Motion
  • Dependencies: motion, clsx, tailwind-merge

Examples

Faulty Terminal

API reference

PropTypeDefaultDescription
scalenumber14Glyph cell size in px.
speednumber1
scanlinesbooleantrue
colorstring"var(--ember)"Phosphor colour.
flickernumber0.4
curvaturenumber0.3
classNamestring—

About Faulty Terminal

Faulty Terminal is an old monitor full of glyph noise: rows scroll and flicker, bands of corruption tear across, scanlines and curved glass sit on top, and the brightness breathes.

Faulty Terminal is an animated background for React 19, styled with Tailwind CSS 4 and animated with Motion. It drops into Next.js, Vite, Remix or Astro through the shadcn CLI as a single file you own.

When to use Faulty Terminal

  • Retro and terminal brands.
  • Security and hacking themes.
  • Gaming and horror.
  • Developer tool heroes.

How it works

Glyphs churn on a canvas and tears offset rows briefly; the glass is CSS. It runs on a canvas capped at 2x pixel density, pauses when scrolled off screen, and reads its colours from your theme tokens so it follows dark mode.

The whole layer is decorative and aria-hidden, sits behind your content without taking pointer events it does not need, and pauses when scrolled off screen. With prefers-reduced-motion on, it holds still or settles instantly instead of animating.

Customizing Faulty Terminal

Every prop is documented in the API reference above with its type and default. The ones you will reach for first are listed here.

The Customize panel next to the preview lets you change scale, speed, scanlines, flicker, curvature live, and the Code tab updates to match, so the snippet you copy already carries your values.

  • scale (number, default 14): Glyph cell size in px.
  • speed (number, default 1).
  • scanlines (boolean, default true).
  • color (string, default "var(--ember)"): Phosphor colour.
  • flicker (number, default 0.4).
  • curvature (number, default 0.3).

Goes well with Faulty Terminal

These backgrounds pieces share its tokens and motion language, so they sit together on one page without clashing.

  • Ember Field: An animated React ember background: glowing embers drift up and flicker as they cool
  • Smoke: A slow React smoke background: blurred plumes drifting over dark sections, CSS only
  • Aurora: An animated React aurora background: soft light bands drifting across a section
  • Grid Beams: A React grid background with beams of light running along its lines
  • Meteors: A React meteor shower background: streaks falling diagonally, CSS only

Install Faulty Terminal

npx shadcn@latest add @charcoal/faulty-terminal

Faulty Terminal is part of Charcoal UI Pro. One seat unlocks all 300 Pro components, 107 landing-page sections and 100 full templates, for every personal and client project, with updates included. Add the @charcoal registry once with your access token, then the command above copies faulty-terminal.tsx into components/ui and installs clsx, tailwind-merge.

You own the file you install: no runtime package, no lock-in, nothing to keep in sync. Change it however your product needs.

See Charcoal UI Pro pricing · Pro setup

Frequently asked questions

How do I install Faulty Terminal?
Faulty Terminal is part of Charcoal UI Pro. Add the @charcoal registry to components.json with your access token, then run npx shadcn@latest add @charcoal/faulty-terminal. It copies faulty-terminal.tsx into components/ui and installs motion, clsx, tailwind-merge.
Is Faulty Terminal free for commercial use?
Faulty Terminal needs a Charcoal UI Pro seat, monthly or a one-time lifetime price. A seat covers unlimited personal and commercial projects, including client work, and every future Pro component.
Does Faulty Terminal work with Next.js?
Yes. It is a client component for React 19 styled with Tailwind CSS 4, so it works in the Next.js App Router and Pages Router, Vite, Remix and Astro.
Can an AI coding agent install Faulty Terminal?
Yes. Connect the Charcoal UI MCP server (https://charcoalui.com/mcp) to Claude Code, Cursor or any MCP client; get_component returns Faulty Terminal's props and get_install_command returns the exact command.

Faulty Terminal as Markdown · llms.txt