Cathode: A terminal app for mac that looks really cool | Hacker News Reader

Cathode: A terminal app for mac that looks really cool

itunes.apple.com

72 pointsblktiger60 comments

$10? It might be a fun trick to show off to friends, but I am sure as hell not doing any serious work in that.

iTerm2 'till I die!

A fun trick? Are you kidding me? I've never spend money that fast before (I had bought it before it got in the App Store).

Cathode is awesome, especially if, like me, you have ever worked in such an environment (VT100 etc). I even dropped iTerm 2 and use Cathode all day long. Something about the blast-from-the-past feel makes me more productive and feel like an ol' hacker.

Only wish it had tabs.

no tabs !! REALLY !?

You care to explain how awesome it is?

I never understood why people want their terminal emulators to have tabs. Screen/tmux do it so much better...

This. Clicking? No. Alt+Shift+Number? No. Good old-fashioned Ctrl-a ".

Command-left, command-right.

What are the main advantages of screen/tmux in comparison with simple terminal tabs?

For starters, detaching.

Mainly the detach/attach facility. I can open it from ssh, without even closing the session in the terminal. They also provide split window facilities, tmux even more so.

My tabs and state are on the REMOTE end of my connection. I never lose it.

Copy and paste is easy, no rat.

Old VTs are cheap on eBay and are fun to play with.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/6854396657/light...

Is that a HHKB? If so how are you liking it?

All day? I don't think I could take the ergonomic hit. I am pretty sensitive about readable color schemes in Emacs, reducing glare, etc. etc..

Whatever floats your boat, I guess...

Cathode has ANSI/xterm color support, so you can keep using your color schemes. Also, you can tweak the vintage-ness level.

I'm surprised to see so many complaints about the price. I was happy to pay $10 just to reward the effort for such an impressively geeky toy when it first showed up a year ago, even though I've never used it for real work.

I will be complaining if the developers only support the App Store version now though.

edit: I hadn't thought about it from the perspective of not being able to play around with it before buying. I wouldn't have based on three screenshots and a one-sentence description. As gammarator mentioned above, there's a free version on the developer's site that's well worth checking out. The granular control of the effects and overall attention to detail is really cool.

You can download a free version (with some effects locked) from the Secret Geometry web store: http://store.secretgeometry.com/download.php?id=7

http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/

It's a neat toy, but is pretty much useless for real work when compared to apple's built-in terminal. Seems to not correctly support PS1s, at least in the case of zsh. I'd be surprised by anyone that would actually pay $10 for this, seems like $1 would be a better price point for a toy app.

How many actual toys (that cost like $1 to produce) cost lots more than $10, and you wouldn't think twice about buying them? How much is a Barbie Doll nowadays?

Bitching about $10 reminds me of this Oatmeal strip: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps

Well, all it's saying is that people feel queasy about spending on Desktop Environment decor.

Depends on how you want to spend the 10 entertaiment dollars. Some people watch movies, some play World of Warcraft, some buy applications that emulate grandpa's computer. ;)

You're calling me a grandpa?!!!

I used those kinds of terminals, mid nineties in Uni...

You just used "real work" in the same sentence as "osx built in terminal"? Has Apple made a lot of fixes to terminal recently?

To elaborate on this: iTerm2 is much better than Terminal.app, and free. It seems to be the default thing that everybody recommends, and for good reason.

http://www.iterm2.com/

I recently downloaded iTerm2 because I had been hearing this. I can't for the life of me see why anyone thinks it is better than Terminal.

It might just be my usage pattern, which is basically tmux. I was even briefly excited about the so called tmux integration of iTerm2, but it actually made a great tool worthless.

Now I'm interested. Why is it better? I use terminal only to navigate and run commands, no Vim or Emacs. How will iTerm make my life better?

It doesn't randomly barf terminal control sequences into the top of your Emacs buffers, for one. ;) I've lost count of how many times I broke my build because of something like "]24;" being inserted into the head of my source files.

aiscott: terminal.app got a decent boost in Lion.. prior to that it was pretty lacking for people used to your basic linux terminal even. iterm2 fixed that up around the sametime andgot traction, thats all. you are nt missing anything, go with what wjorks for yourself.

I've used the osx terminal for "real work" every day for about 6 years now...

I think the whole differences are in some edge cases (though for some those cases could be their bread and butter), like escape codes handling, advanced ncurses stuff, etc etc.

I've been using it for about six years as well, and every version is a little better. The only annoyance is having to add keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs, but to make up for that, it supports UTF-8 (Japanese/Chinese input) perfectly.

Never got that working in iTerm, although newer versions might be better.

The only thing that still annoys me is that you can't rename the tabs (without doing some silly work-around). I have 10 tabs in Terminal.app with "bash" written in them.

I’ve been using this since about version 0.93 and the developer has done a great job with each new update. I’m thrilled to see it on the App Store and with good publicity. I started using because I wanted an authentic terminal experience for hacking around—the slight fuzziness of edges, the phosphor glow when the contrast is turned up too high, the ability to simulate a 1200bps connection—I find it much more captivating than perfect crisp black on white 9-point monaco.

That said, it still has bugs—the game of Life in emacs, for example, totally screws up the screen buffer, and it lacks several functions; shift-home/end to go to the start/end of the command line, and key repeat, to name a couple (and it drives me crazy every time I try to use them in vain). Overall though it’s a great throwback, and conversation starter (really!) and it’s $10 I’ve had no regrets in spending.

Cute, but it emulates the warping that I hated in CRTs. I used to waste too much time tweaking my CRT monitors to find the minimal amount of distortion possible. I love modern screens because of this.

Everything is adjustable. You can emulate and finetune only the artifacts you did love from displays of old.

= GLTerminal, from 2002: http://ldopa.net/2006/01/14/glterminal/

Cathode was made as a third party replacement for GLTerminal. The original was never finished and had lots of horrible bugs, and the author never even released it to the public and (IIRC) had no idea how it wound up on the internet.

c.f http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/01/cathode-vintage-terminal-emu...

tl;dr: The xscreensaver package has a program that does something very like this. It's open-source, and works on both linux and OS X.

Nice. Works on Ubuntu, and it's free. I got my jollies for a couple minutes, realized how much I prefer readable text and smaller but legible font sizes, and closed it.

Ideally, this CRT-ness could be a Compiz plug-in. Let's say you could CRT-ize a window by pressing Meta-C or something like it.

Then just open a terminal full-screen, apply the plug-in and enjoy your vintage computer.

For best effect, change your font to a VT-100-like one (I prefer the 3278-like one, but that's a taste thing).

BTW, how hard is it to write a Compiz plug-in?

Just remind me http://jstn.cc/post/8692501831 story.

I want one.

Is $10 the standard rate for a gimmicky kind of app like this on the mac store? Seems a bit high to me, but I'm not an expert.

Cool, but definitely not worth $10

Reminds me of the CRT simulator for Stella http://www.bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator.shtml

MAME does it too, right?

oh! i hadn't been paying attention. thank you! http://mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_0145.txt

What this needs is a web cam bit to emulate the reflection. Currently you can take a photo of yourself but it's just not good enough :P

Agreed, that would be awesome.. though just the fact that the angle of the reflection changes as you move the window around was the 'shut up and take my money' moment for me.

If you are a hardcore terminal user, then you will run into layout bugs at this stage. I'm interested enough in why this is the case, what exactly had to be written from scratch. There must be some terminal emulators out there under both GPL and BSD licenses.

I run into problems using mutt, vi and pagers, so I find myself pressing Control-L a lot. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. This doesn't really bother me.

I enjoy being in this terminal. The effects at low volume and to taste can be soothing when you take a break and look at something, watching something compile. I don't like "perfect" text or printing that you can achieve with modern computers.

At the moment, I can't use this for e-mail (I bought it on Friday). I'll see how coding goes. Command line editing has so far been bearable.

Performance is poor on my Macbook Pro 17in (late 2010) in full screen. Looks great sized down, and I would love to play around with it, but it seems best suited for full screen. ;)

What, didn't everyone else get an actual vt100 from college surplus for $5 and keep it running?

I don't know why, but this has a strange allure to me...

Cool app! Just not too much to my MacBook, 5 mins and it runs too hot. But it's a neat trick.

Saw the design and went "o0o0o!" then saw the price and went "aww..."

While not nearly as comprehensive, using VT220 font[1] is kinda cool too.

[1] http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/

Aside: These iTunes links don't work when reading from an iPad or iPhone. It would be helpful if Mobile Safari could redirect to the publisher's website.

Is there a CRT-like terminal for Javascript/HTML? I was just wishing for one to use in a project the other day, but not enough to tackle it myself.

Very cool! Is there a Windows equivalent?

On windows, I use this program: http://hackertyper.net/132892717764

Count me squarely in the "I would buy this if it wasn't $10" camp. It's nifty, but that's about it.

This thing makes my GPU hot.

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