A blinking cursor where the search box used to be
No buttons, no logo, no autocomplete guessing what you meant. Just a prompt and the assumption that you already know what to type. Which most people don’t, and that’s the fun part.
Type anything and it answers. Type something it doesn’t recognise and it tells you so in a slightly rude way, like a real shell would. The green glow and the scanlines aren’t decoration either, they make the text look like it’s sitting a millimetre behind glass.
Start with help
It prints a list. About a dozen things work, and a few of them are jokes hidden behind ordinary-looking names. fish is one. sudo is another and it will refuse you.
What people actually type first
Their own name, usually. Then ls, because it feels like the polite thing to do in a terminal. The directory listing is fake but it’s populated with the other tricks on the site, so it doubles as a menu you have to work for.
After that it splits. Some people go straight for matrix and let the code rain fill the window. Others discover that searching from the command line actually returns something and spend a while typing questions at it.
The sudo response
Worth trying once. It’s the closest thing here to an actual punchline and it lands better if nobody spoils it for you.
Old-web tricks that pair with this
If a command line feels nostalgic, 1998 google is the same nostalgia in a different costume: the original beige homepage, exclamation mark in the logo and all. goooooooooogle keeps stretching the logo across pagination the way the old results pages did, one o per page, forever.
For green text on black taken to its conclusion, google matrix drops the whole page into falling glyphs. And if you’d rather play than type, the terminal’s games command points at google snake game and google pac-man, both of which run in the browser with nothing to install.