The Costa GUI

costa.jacobpalm.dk via FedericoSchonborn — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:06:10 +0000

Costa is a small and lightweight application which runs on top of MS-DOS or compatible operating systems. It replaces the DOS-prompt with a clean, user-friendly interface - a so-called GUI (Graphical User Interface). Costa comes packed with a bunch of useful accessories and can be used with or without a mouse.

Developed by Jacob Palm, a Danish IT-professional and hobby developer, the first release of Costa came way back in 2004. Over the years - and through several releases - Costa has gradually evolved into what it is today, with new releases still coming out regularly as of 2025.

Costa is provided free of charge, and the source code is open sourced for anyone who wants to have a look. To see what others think of Costa, have a look at Costa on the Web on the blog.

Download

You can download the latest version of Costa now, free of charge. To get started, simply unzip the downloaded archive and run Costa. Full documentation is included in the download.

Since September 2017, the full source code has been available for free under the MIT license. Visit Codeberg to see the source code, and to pull a copy for your own use.

Download Costa 1.8.0 Get source code

Looking for older versions? Check the archive, which also has a complete log of changes in every version.